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The Origins of Pure and Applied Science in Gilded Age America
By Paul Lucier*
ABSTRACT
“Pure science” and “applied science” have peculiar histories in the United States. Both
terms were in use in the early part of the nineteenth century, but it was only in the last
decades that they took on new meanings and became commonplace in the discourse of
American scientists. The rise in their currency reflected an acute concern about the
corruption of character and the real possibilities of commercializing scientific knowledge.
“Pure” was the preference of scientists who wanted to emphasize their nonpecuniary
motives and their distance from the marketplace. “Applied” was the choice of scientists
who accepted patents and profits as other possible returns on their research. In general, the
frequent conjoining of “pure” and “applied” bespoke the inseparable relations of science
and capitalism in the Gilded Age.
IN AUGUST 1883, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS), Henry Rowland, professor of physics at the newly founded Johns Hopkins
University, made “A Plea for Pure Science.” To historians of American science and technology it is
a well-known speech, for Rowland is eminently quotable:
American science is a thing of the future, and not of the present or past; and the proper
course for one in my position is to consider what must be done to create a science of
physics in this country, rather than to call telegraphs, electric lights, and such conveniences,
by the name of science. I do not wish to underrate the value of all these things; the progress
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of the world depends on them, and he is to be honored who cultivates them successfully. …
And yet it is not an uncommon thing, especially in American newspapers, to have the
applications of science confounded with pure science; and some obscure American who
steals the ideas of some great mind of the past, and enriches himself by the application of
the same to domestic uses, is often lauded above the great originator of the idea, who might
have worked out hundreds of such applications had his mind possessed the necessary
element of vulgarity. I have often been asked, which was the more important to the world,
pure or applied science. To have the application of science, the science itself must exist.1
Selections from Rowland have been used for a wide variety of scholarly arguments, including the
general indifference of nineteenth-century Americans to basic science, the flaws in nineteenthcentury American physics, the dilemma of best-science elitism in a democratic culture, the
relationship between Rowland and Thomas Edison, the scientist’s new professional role in American
society, and the self-sacrifice and suffering of those same scientists.2 This essay focuses on two of
the most prominent themes of Rowland’s “Plea”: first, the insistent disassociation of “pure science”
from “applied science”; and second, the equally insistent association of “pure” and “applied.” In the
first instance, the two must not be confounded; in the second, they are causally linked. To
understand how two concepts can be separable and inseparable—simultaneously—it will be
necessary to try to define “pure science” and “applied science” in terms that Rowland and his
contemporaries would have understood.3
To answer the questions, What is pure? What is applied? it might be useful to begin with a
twenty-first-century perspective on late nineteenth-century America. As Rowland’s speech made
clear, American men of science were comfortable using these concepts, and so too were most
literate Americans. The familiarity can be displayed graphically using Google’s N-gram Viewer, a
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yearly plot of the frequency of appearance of a particular word or word phrase in Google’s
database of scanned books. As Figure 1 shows, the terms “pure science” and “applied science,”
although in use prior to 1860, rose in currency sharply after the Civil War. What can also be shown
is a change in vocabulary. Although the terms were not exactly synonymous, for reasons to be
explained, antebellum Americans were more likely to use terms like “application(s) of science” or
“practical science” instead of “applied science” and “abstract science” or “theoretical science”
rather than “pure science.” The switch in vocabulary occurred in the mid 1880s, just about the time
Rowland was speaking to the AAAS.
PURE
“Pure” was a protean concept, and nowhere in his speech did Rowland try to define the term,
exactly. He presumed that everyone already knew, or thought they knew, what it meant, and such
assurance allowed him to range over a number of important and urgent concerns, all implicitly tied
to purity. The most familiar of the putative meanings of “pure science” was “science-for-the-sakeof-science,” a definition that would have been understood by most American men of science well
before Rowland. In his advertisement to the first issue of his American Journal of Science and the
Arts in 1818, for instance, Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale,
expressed a desire for “science [to] be cherished for its own sake, and with a due respect to its own
dignity.” Similarly, Joseph Henry, professor of physics at Princeton and then first secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution, explained in his 1850 presidential address to the AAAS that the man of
science pursues “abstract researches [that] pertain not immediately to wants of life.” Perhaps the
most detailed presentation on the science-for-its-own-sake theme was given to the AAAS by the
astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould. In his 1868 address, Gould spoke of “the class of men who
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give up their lives to scientific study,” and he even had a new name for these self-sacrificing
seekers of truth—scientists. The “function of the scientist,” declared Gould, “is to attain new
truths.” In all these examples, by and for men of science, “pure” meant only one thing: a devotion
to or passion for—solely—science. Rowland thus played on an old theme when he called upon
scientists to “study nature from pure love.”4
In the mid-nineteenth century, none devoutly wished for a consummation of this ideal more
than a self-selected group known as the Lazzaroni. Gould, Henry, and Alexander Dallas Bache
dedicated themselves to improving scientific standards and establishing a like-minded community,
efforts that bore fruit with the Smithsonian Institution (1846), the AAAS (1848), and the National
Academy of Sciences (1863). In standard models of professionalization, scholars have
bookmarked these organizations as an important stage—the institutionalization of science.5 But
Rowland and his contemporaries did not regard the AAAS or the NAS as anything laudable. In
1874 Simon Newcomb, mathematician and astronomer at the Naval Observatory, belittled these
institutions as “insignificant.” “A history of attempts to organize learned societies in this country
would afford an instructive study … [of] decay and death,” he explained. “The principal features
of the decadence would be, first, a constant enlargement of the range of membership, and
consequent lowering of the tone of society; then a gradual and unnoticed falling off of the abler
members, until the society is reduced to a state which a physician would describe as great
constitutional weakness.” In Newcomb’s experience, the clearest sign of American decline was an
attack on the body scientific by a “parasite in the form of a charlatan.”6 According to Newcomb
and Rowland, standards had fallen—or perhaps they had never been set, for Henry and Bache, too,
had feared charlatans; nonetheless, the pernicious persistence of humbugs revealed the public’s
continued ignorance of science and the gaps in the not-so-solid front that scientists wished to
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present. To be “pure,” American science needed integrity, and in this sense the quest for purity
echoed the antebellum call for exclusivity, an unalloyed organization of scientists committed to a
common cause.7
But even if America had a national organization with the highest standards for
membership, scientists still needed a place to pursue “pure science.” Since the early nineteenth
century, men of science had been lobbying for salaried positions in which they could do science,
and Bache’s Coast Survey, for one, had provided many such jobs. Accordingly, the chemist
J. Lawrence Smith, in his 1873 AAAS address, thought scientists might look to the federal
government “for employment in pure science.” But Newcomb knew from firsthand experience that
the federal government, while “quite willing to afford the means of increasing that knowledge [of
nature],” would do so only “on being satisfied that the money will be judiciously expended.”8 If
purity translated into funding without strings attached (as many scholars assume), then the
government was not the place to look for such independence from accountability.
And neither was the university. As Newcomb noted, America’s “so-called universities”
expected nothing in original investigation. Rowland disparaged these “400 institutions” as a
swarming “cloud of mosquitoes, instead of eagles,” and he despaired that professors were
“burdened down with the work [of teaching]” and thus had neither time nor energy for scientific
research.9 A “true” university needed well-paid professorships and well-appointed laboratories,
and Rowland’s reformed institution, modeled on a German ideal, would be “pure” by virtue of
being a refuge for research and a preserve from the pressures of the outside world.
The most powerful of those pressures was money. In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles
Dudley Warner famously described this new era of money and materialism as the Gilded Age.
Whereas an earlier generation had enjoyed a supposedly golden age of honesty and morality, post–
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Civil War Americans wallowed in corruption and the corruption “issue”—that is, the constant
suspicion of bribery, graft, and immorality in politics and public life. In 1868, Gould characterized
this degenerate culture as the age of “tinsel”—or the Tinseled Age, if that expression can be
coined—which valued only “some tangible end capable of being represented by dollars.” Rowland
could not have agreed more. “Commerce, the applications of science, the accumulation of wealth,”
were a “curse to those with high ideals.”10 “Pure science” thus served as an antidote to commercial
corruption.
But turning the tide of the Tinseled Age would not be easy. “Those who wish to pursue
pure science in our country,” explained Rowland, “must be prepared to face public opinion in a
manner which requires much moral courage.” The almighty dollar was powerfully alluring.
“Everybody can comprehend a million of money,” he whinged, “but how few can comprehend any
advance in scientific theory.” Even those university professors whom Rowland held up as ideal
scientists faced imminent and immoral inducements, and often they succumbed to temptation.
Professors “who devote themselves to commercial work … and to any other work to increase their
present large income,” railed Rowland, “would be respectable if they gave up the name
professor.”11 Professors were supposed to be thinking about ideas, not earnings. “Purity” referred
to motivation—truth before gain. “Pure science” was therefore defined by its nonpecuniary nature.
And here was the meaning peculiar to the Tinseled Age. For those late nineteenth-century
Americans who believed that the love of money was the root of corruption, a person unsullied by
filthy lucre was “pure.”12
APPLIED
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“Applied” was not the opposite of “pure,” as many at the time and since have noted. But “applied
science” was distinct from “pure science.” Rowland did not disparage “applied science”; rather, he
urged his fellow scientists to persevere in their pursuit of purity. But he also did not advocate for
an indulgence in impractical or useless knowledge, per se, as some of his critics would later
assert—and also some historians, who assume that by “pure” Rowland meant “freedom,” a
complete release from the pressure of justification in terms of practical results. Rowland, like
Silliman, Henry, Bache, and most American men of science, believed that knowledge was useful;
it just need not be immediately so. Immediacy was the problem, not the need for results. Rowland
did not discount the commercial or cultural value of telegraphs or electric lights, but in order to
create a distinct moral value for “pure science” he needed to devise a conceptual space for
scientific theories and research (along with a physical one—a well-endowed “first class” university
like Johns Hopkins). “Pure” might be imagined as the distance between research and result. This
ideological work of distancing could be done by interposing a link between theory and things—in
a word, application.
The “application of science” was a commonplace to nineteenth-century men of science. It
described a relatively straightforward process (a linear model?) whereby men of science produced
theories and men of invention picked up those ideas and made them useful by patenting or
commercializing them. It is doubtful whether the process ever operated (or even existed) in such a
simple way, but in post–Civil War America “the application of scientific knowledge” as a
synonym for “the process of invention” was considered a rhetorical fact. “It would be throwing
words away were I to undertake to prove, what you all know already,” recounted Gould in 1868,
“that scarcely one of all the great advances in the material welfare of humanity would have been
made but for the scientist in his closet, whose experiments, researches and generalizations, incited
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by the love of nature and the aspiration to fathom her laws, have afforded the knowledge which the
inventor’s fertility of device has made subservient to human welfare.” This dependence was so
obvious that Gould did not bother to name any particulars, beyond noting that “technology”
resulted from the “most direct application [of] physical research” and chemistry was “an important
handmaid to manufacture and to metallurgy.”13 Rowland, of course, assumed an intimate and
inevitable linkage between science and material welfare, and he even made a list of the progress of
the latter, which included telegraphs, electric lights, electric railways, and the transmission of
electric power. Rowland’s “Plea” was so strident because the conceptual distance between theory
and things had seemingly disappeared, thus creating a new and perplexing problem:
misidentification. Science was being confounded with its applications. Rowland’s consternation is
understandable; many Americans no longer subscribed to the putative linear model but, instead, to
“applied science,” a new concept describing new types of knowledge, new practices, new places,
and new products—all of which typified Tinseled Age America.
The bankruptcy of the applications-equals-inventions process can be highlighted by
Rowland’s rhetorical work in constructing a Tinseled Age inventor. To conceive a place for “pure
science,” Rowland needed to contrast it with something at the opposite end of the spectrum, like
“pure invention.” If scientists were defined by their nonpecuniary motives, then inventors had to
be totally different, a “class” of individuals “whose shallow mind imagines that the only pursuit of
mankind is money.” Accordingly, the (impure) inventor “steals the ideas of some great mind of the
past, and enriches himself by the application of the same to domestic uses.” Rowland was not the
first, nor the most vehement, to denounce inventors as vulgar thieves. In the early 1850s, the
chemist and geologist Charles T. Jackson had introduced the refrain about how “men of science
devote their lives to increasing the sum of human knowledge,” while “mere speculator[s] in
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inventions” were the scoundrels who “stole” scientific discoveries by patenting them. “No true
man of science will ever disgrace himself by asking for a patent,” announced Jackson, “and if he
should, he might not know what to do with it any more than the man did who drew an elephant at a
raffle. He cannot and will not leave his scientific pursuits to turn showman, mechanic, or
merchant.”14 Rowland was merely following a familiar and slightly sanctimonious script that said
that a patent was proof of the profit motive.
Not so, responded William A. Anthony, professor of physics at Cornell University and one
of the first to teach a course in electrical engineering in the United States. In his 1887 address to
the Physics Section of the AAAS, Anthony remarked that many of “our foremost scientific
workers have not given free of all their scientific work to the world.” He found “in looking over
the patent records the names of Sir William Thomson … and other physicists, who have applied to
the patent office for protection in the use of what they have discovered.” In fact, he observed “that
Professor Rowland, of Baltimore, has patented a method of casting metals and a method of
grinding screws.” Anthony was not reveling in Rowland’s hypocrisy so much as revealing the
difficulty in drawing clear distinctions between science and invention, between different types of
“contributions to knowledge.” “We must not forget,” he explained, “that there is much in science
that has a pecuniary value and that there will be a hundred workers with the less noble motive,
where there is one who has no thought of pecuniary gains. It does not do to say that these workers
are only promoting the application of science. … The work done is the same, whatever the motive
that led to the doing.” Scientists could not be burnished as pure any more than inventors could be
tarnished as impure. A disdain for patenting was not evidence of an enlightened intention, any
more than a willingness to file was proof of a monetary motive. “This is the age of invention,”
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declared Anthony, when “substantial contributions to science [are made] by men engaged in
commercial pursuits.”15
No better example of this duality of purpose might be found than in the telephone and in its
patent holder, Alexander Graham Bell. In the early 1870s Bell was a professor of vocal physiology
and elocution at Boston University, but teaching, as Rowland had carped, took up so much time
that he had little left for experimenting with sound. A wealthy benefactor helped Bell secure space
for a laboratory, some equipment, a paid assistant, and a patent, granted in March 1876. The
commercialization of the telephone patent made Bell very wealthy but no less committed to the
advancement of science, which he demonstrated by purchasing and relaunching the journal Science
in 1883. In the 9 February issue of that year, Bell’s journal spelled out the meaning of “applied
science,” and it is worth citing the explanation at length for its energetic opposition to Rowland’s
later view. “The leading feature of American science,” explained the editors of Science, “and that
which most distinctively characterizes it, is its utilitarianism.” They went on to assert,
Research is none the less genuine, investigation none the less worthy, because the truth it
discovers is utilizable for the benefit of mankind. Granting, even, that the discovery of truth
for its own sake is a nobler pursuit [than] that [of] the man who discovers nothing himself,
but only applies to useful purposes the principles which others have discovered. … But
when the investigator becomes himself the utilizer; when the same mind that made the
discovery contrives also the machine by which it is applied to useful purposes, —the
combined achievement must be ranked as superior to either of its separate results.
This new hybrid, the investigator-utilizer, was superior to both the scientist and the inventor.
Researches and results were sealed in the patents for telephones, telegraphs, electric lights, electric
railways, and many other things, according to Bell’s journal—including Rowland’s “exquisite
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gratings.”16 These patents exemplified the new concept of “applied science” as much as Bell,
himself, embodied it.17
“Another direction in which applied science has been developed in this country,” continued
the editors of Science, “is found in the work done by various government organizations.” They
highlighted the Coast Survey and the recently established Geological Survey (1879). These
agencies were committed to the practical (“an important factor in the citizens’ welfare”) as well as
to the theoretical (“the highest value to pure science”). In this sense, “applied science” was very
much like the “practical science” of the antebellum period. State geological surveys and the Coast
Survey under Bache’s superintendency (1843–1867) were often praised by the public, politicians,
and their scientific peers for their skillful balancing of the “economical” and the “theoretical.” The
major differences between pre– and post–Civil War government science were scale, scope, and
permanency. It is not surprising, then, to find members of government agencies among the most
vociferous opponents of Rowland’s vision of “pure science.” “Denunciation of other men engaged
in scientific pursuits on the grounds that their motives are not the proper ones,” explained the
physician John Shaw Billings, director of the library of the Surgeon General’s Office and president
of the Philosophical Society of Washington, D.C., in 1886, “are often based on insufficient or
inaccurate knowledge, and seldom, I think do good.” Billings, though, had no compunction about
ridiculing the pretensions of “a certain class of eulogists of pure science [as] dudeism.” “It is one
thing to seek one’s own pleasure,” concluded Billings, “and quite another to pride one’s self upon
doing so.” John Wesley Powell agreed. In his testimony before a special House-Senate
investigation into waste in government scientific bureaus in 1886, Powell, the director of the
Geological Survey, blasted “narrow and dilettante scientists who retort that science is too exalted
to be in any manner interested in utilitarian results.” “Sometimes these wiseacres,” testified
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Powell, “boast of their devotion to pure science.” There was no virtue in the purely useless, he
insisted; the proper object of science was “to promote the welfare of the people.”18
Robert H. Thurston, dean of Cornell University’s Silbey College of Engineering, and
historians’ go-to guy on the multiple meanings of “applied science,” made the same point in 1884
(the year after Rowland’s “Plea”) to the Mechanical Science Section of the AAAS. In “The
Mission of Science,” Thurston defined “applied science” rather easily as “the union of science and
art, which is the distinguishing characteristic of the age in which we live.” “Applied science” was
“most closely related to the industries of the world,” and “in industry,” explained Thurston,
“applied science finds its plainest and its most obvious line of application.” The application of
applied science—this was a very confounding concept to purists, who thought that science was
supposed to be separate from invention. Thurston, however, had made them inseparable, and that
conflation had troubled Rowland. Here, then, was the new meaning of “applied science” and the
new vision of American science that had inspired Thurston, Powell, Billings, Bell, and Anthony.
“We are, in fact,” concluded Thurston, “at the very threshold of the true era of applied science.”19
CONCLUSION
The fortunes of “pure science” and “applied science” have waxed and waned relative to one
another over the course of the last 130 years, as can be seen in Figure 2, but they have never been
separable.20 Scholars, on the other hand, have often tried to do exactly that. Historians of science,
for their part, have tended to emphasize the “pure” because Rowland’s reforms fit well with
narratives about the professionalization of American science and the subsequent rise of research
universities and of the mathematical and physical sciences. Historians of technology, in turn, have
waged a campaign over the last three decades to reject the definition of “technology” as “applied
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science,” and the most favored point of attack in their assault on equivalence is the so-called linear
model by which science leads to technology—a model that, today, is entirely dead.21 What has
been lost in both historiographies is the nineteenth-century meanings of “pure science” and
“applied science.”
“Pure science” and “applied science” were both products of Gilded Age America and thus
they were often conjoined—“pure” and “applied.” But they were also distinct concepts whose
respective proponents held very different visions for the future. An appeal to “pure science”
bespoke a pessimism about the corrupting influence of money and materialism. Rowland and his
ilk feared for American science, and his “Plea” was a passionate proposal for reform. To create a
science of physics—or, more generally, to create any science—Americans had first to fund and
equip “first class” universities, with well-paid and light-teaching-load professorships for the very
best researchers. Such scientists would be judged (and, ideally, admired) for the quality of their
research as much as for the content of their character. The public would benefit by the advancement of
knowledge and, in time, by the “applications of science.” Nonetheless, “pure science” envisioned an
opposition of interests, a moral economy in which knowledge and commerce should not mix. “Applied
science” bespoke an optimism about the ability of individuals to manage money and its allure. Bell and
his cohort believed that research could be genuine and useful; patents were emblems of good science
and material goods. A combination of interests was possible and even encouraged. This kind of moral
economy was also evident in government agencies, where “applied science” meant a selflessness or
duty to others, before a singular and selfish pursuit of one’s own interests. “Pure” and “applied” thus
represented an essential tension in the relations between the search for knowledge and the pursuit of
profit in a capitalist society.
14
* mailto:35 Bethany Road, Wakefield, Rhode Island 02879; plucier@alumni.princeton.edu.
1
Henry A. Rowland, “A Plea for Pure Science,” Science, 1883, 2:242–250, on p.
2
Richard Harrison Shryock, “American Indifference to Basic Science during the
242.
Nineteenth Century,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 1948, 5:50–65; Howard S.
Miller, Dollars for Research: Science and Its Patrons in Nineteenth-Century America (Seattle:
Univ. Washington Press, 1970), pp. 183–187; Nathan Reingold, “American Indifference to Basic
Research: A Reappraisal,” in Nineteenth-Century American Science, ed. George H. Daniels
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 38–62; Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The
History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1995), pp. 43–45; Daniels, “The Pure-Science Ideal and Democratic Culture,” Science, 1967,
156:1699–1705; David A. Hounshell, “Edison and the Pure Science Ideal in Nineteenth-Century
America,” ibid., 1980, 207:612–617; Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: Wiley,
1998), pp. 463–472; Paul Lucier, “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century
America,” Isis, 2009, 100:699–732; and Rebecca M. Herzig, Suffering for Science: Reason and
Sacrifice in Modern America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 47–63.
3
For an update on the enduring debates over definitions and meanings see Paul Forman,
“The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the
History of Technology,” History and Technology, 2007, 23:1–152; Peter Galison, “Ten Problems
in History and Philosophy of Science,” Isis, 2008, 99:111–124; Ann Johnson, “What If We Wrote
the History of Science from the Perspective of Applied Science?” Historical Studies in the Natural
Sciences, 2008, 38:610–620; James E. McClellan III, “What’s Problematic about Applied
15
Science?” in The Applied Science Problem, ed. McClellan (Jersey City, N.J.: Jensen/Daniels,
2008), pp. 1–36; and Ronald R. Kline, “Science and Technology,” in Wrestling with Nature: From
Omens to Science, ed. Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 225–252.
4
Benjamin Silliman, “Plan,” American Journal of Science and the Arts, 1818, 1:v; Joseph
Henry, “Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” in The Papers of
Joseph Henry, Vol. 8: January 1850–December 1853: The Smithsonian Years, ed. Marc
Rothenberg (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), pp. 88–103, on p. 90;
Benjamin Apthorp Gould, “Address,” Proceedings of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, 1869, 18:1–37, on p. 16; and Rowland, “Plea for Pure Science” (cit. n. 1),
p. 243. On the neologism “scientist” see Lucier, “Professional and the Scientist in NineteenthCentury America” (cit. n. 2).
5
“As specimens, spokesmen, and leaders,” the Lazzaroni were the “soul” of American
science: Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), p. 18.
6
Simon Newcomb, “Exact Science in America,” North American Review, 1874, 119:286–
308, on p. 300. Rowland complained that the NAS had no building, library, or publication; see
Rowland, “Plea for Pure Science” (cit. n. 1), p. 249.
7
The best discussion of the criteria for inclusion or exclusion (during the antebellum
period) remains Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848–1860 (Urbana: Univ. Illinois
Press, 1976). For the post–Civil War scientific community see Bruce, Launching of Modern
16
American Science (cit. n. 5); and Lucier, “Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century
America” (cit. n. 2).
8
J. Lawrence Smith, “Science in America and Modern Methods of Science,” American
Naturalist, 1873, 7:577–602, on p. 579; and Newcomb, “Exact Science in America” (cit. n. 6), p.
302.
9
Newcomb, “Exact Science in America,” p. 297; and Rowland, “Plea for Pure Science”
(cit. n. 1), p. 244.
10
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford,
Conn.: American Publishing, 1873); Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993); Gould, “Address” (cit. n. 4), p. 31; and Rowland, “Plea for Pure
Science,” pp. 244, 243–244. See also, e.g., Ira Remsen, The Relation between Chemical Science
and Chemical Industry: An Address Delivered before the Chemical and Natural History Society of
the Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pa., 1888); Reingold, “American Indifference to Basic
Research” (cit. n. 2), pp. 45–46; and Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal
and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 313–323.
11
Rowland, “Plea for Pure Science,” pp. 242, 244.
12
1 Timothy 3:3; and 1 Timothy 6:10: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
13
Gould, “Address” (cit. n. 4), pp. 14, 13. Gould avoided the mistake of assuming that
“because valuable inventions are usually due to scientific discoveries, they must be deemed a
necessary consequence thereof”: ibid., p. 14.
14
Rowland, “Plea for Pure Science” (cit. n. 1), p. 242; and Charles T. Jackson,
“Encouragement and Cultivation of the Sciences in the United States,” Transactions of the
17
American Institute, 1851, pp. 227–246, on p. 237. For Jackson’s role in numerous high-profile
court cases see Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers (cit. n. 10).
15
W. A. Anthony, “Address,” Proc. Amer. Assoc. Advance. Sci., 1887, 36:69–78, on pp.
70, 71, 70, 72. For more on William Thomson’s patents see Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise,
Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1989).
16
“The Future of American Science,” Science, 1883, 1:1–3, on pp. 1, 2. For more on
science and patents see Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday, Patently Contestable: Historical
Trials of Electricity, Identity, and Inventorship (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming).
17
Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973). According to Thomas P. Hughes, Bell, along with Edison, Elihu
Thomson, Nikola Tesla, Elmer Sperry, and a few other inventor-entrepreneurs, characterized the
great American era of independent inventors; see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A
Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989), pp.
13–52.
18
Future of American Science” (cit. n. 16), p. 2; John S. Billings, “Scientific Men and
Their Duties,” Science, 1886, 8:541–551, on pp. 544, 543; and On the Organization of Scientific
Work of the General Government, Pt. 2: Additional Statements (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1886), pp. 1077–1078, 1082 (Powell’s testimony).
19
Robert H. Thurston, “The Mission of Science,” Proc. Amer. Assoc. Advance. Sci., 1884,
33:227–253, on pp. 238, 248, 239. For more on Thurston see Ronald Kline, “Construing
‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United
States, 1880–1945,” Isis, 1995, 86:194–221.
18
20
Graphing the term “basic science” over the twentieth century shows a dramatic increase
in its frequency of use after World War II and its replacement of “pure science.” A possible
explanation of this substitution might involve the atomic bomb and Vannevar Bush’s Science—The
Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945). There appears to be no
direct substitute for “applied science,” although terms like “engineering science” also increase in
usage after World War II.
21
Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm, eds., The Science–Industry Nexus:
History, Policy, Implications (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2004).
19
Figure 1. The graph displays the relative frequency of appearance of “abstract science,” “pure
science,” “applications of science,” and “applied science” in books written in English and
published in the United States between 1820 and 1900 (among the books scanned by Google
Books). The bullet points indicate the date (approximately 1882) after which “pure science” and
“applied science” became the most frequently appearing terms. See Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan
Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, the Google
Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven
Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using
Millions of Digitized Books,” Science (published online ahead of print, 16 Dec. 2010). (Generated
using Google Books N-gram Viewer; accessed 9 Mar. 2012.)
Figure 2. The graph displays the relative frequency of appearance of “pure science” and “applied
science” in books written in English and published in the United States between 1820 and 2000.
From Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K.
Gray, William Brockman, the Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy,
Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*,
“Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science (published online
ahead of print, 16 Dec. 2010). (Generated using Google Books N-gram Viewer; accessed 9 Mar.
2012.)