SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY I. BERNARD COHEN HARVARD UNIVERSITY For Americans the outstanding problem in the history of science is to try to understand the failure of our country to produce a great scientific tradition in the nineteenth century. In presenting this problem, I have limited my discussion to the period from Franklin to Gibbs, two Americans who by their fundamental contri- butions to physics won the highest distinctions in science, such as foreign or honor- ary membership in the world's great scientific societies and academies-including both the Acad6mie des Sciences (Paris) and the Royal Society of London. Be- tween the two, the record in physics is meager. To be sure, we can always point with pride to Joseph Henry, but the fact remains that Henry was simply not in the same class with Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Young, Fresnel, Ampere, Joule, Kelvin, Biot, Bunsen, Kirchhoff, Mayer, Helmholtz, and the other greatest giants of the nineteenth century in physics. Furthermore, if we seek mathematical creators in the same interval, there are the members of the Peirce family, but the only outstanding genius in mathematics in America in the nineteenth century was J. J. Sylvester, an Englishman who twice graced our shores. In astronomy things were a little better. There was Newcomb at the century's end and Pickering, and the early photographic experiments-the daguerrotype being used in conjunction with a telescope-and the work of Draper. But how paltry even this is by comparison with the great work done in Europe. In chemistry there are two contributions recorded in European annals: Hare's blowtorch and plunge battery and at the century's end the work of Josiah Parsons Cooke on the periodic classification of the chemical elements. In geology, America contributed more than in the above- mentioned fields: at least descriptions of American geological formations made by native scientists were esteemed by Europeans. And the same is true of the bio- logical sciences to an extent which may aggrandize the work of such botanists as John Torrey and Asa Gray all out of their due proportion. When all is said and done, however, so far as the great new ideas are concerned, or even ideas of some- what lesser importance, the contributions of the nineteenth century made in America are few at best and enter the world's literature largely by courtesy. In one science only is it generally admitted that a major first-class contribution came from Amer- ica-but, alas, the field is one which is not central to our understanding of the nature and interactions of matter, the creation and life of the universe as a whole, or the evolution of life and the basic nature of living functions. I refer, of course, to the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury, esteemed as a founder of the science of oceanography. One can have only the highest admiration for the brave pioneering work of William Beaumont, who made so much of an extraordinary opportunity to study the physiology of digestion. But the pitiful state of American science in his day can be seen in the enormous difficulties Beaumont encountered in at- tempting to do research and the general lack of appreciation of his magnificent achievements, which fortunately were esteemed in Europe. Before exploring this period further, and inquiring into its relevance for our understanding of our own times, let me first clarify one or two major aspects of the 666 Downloaded by guest on September 29, 2021 VOL. 45, 1959 ANTHROPOLOGY: I. B. COHEN 667 problem in the light of history. To begin with, we must face the question whether or not the production of men of science of the highest rank of genius is at all an index of scientific culture. We know so little about the biology of genius-its production and ecology-that perhaps it is not statistically meaningful to use data of this kind in characterizing our American culture. For let us suppose that there are twenty or thirty men of the highest scientific genius produced in the nineteenth century and that the countries where we might expect to find them include America, England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. Taking as a weighting factor for each country its total population, or its number of enrolled college stu- dents, it may turn out that the American failure is not statistically significant. We would tend, therefore, to ask about a larger group, for instance the hundred or two hundred major scientists, the grade A men, not necessarily the A-plus: but the record would still be a poor one. Or, perhaps an even better index of our scientific culture might be the extent to which European scientists cited American scientific work-and here I mean not merely the descriptions of American fauna and flora or geological formations-or the magnitude of the European use of American scientific ideas. Pick up a European history of science in general, or any branch of science in particular, and we must ask whether the general omission of Americans can possibly be an act of ignorance or of mere national prejudice? Historians usually couple the absence of great American science in the nineteenth century with the growth of America to the west and the rise of American industrial society. It is clear, I believe, and beyond argument, that in engineering, in the various applications of science, in inventiveness, America became a major nation early in the nineteenth century. Any comparative study of the number of inven- tions per capita in nineteenth-century America and other countries (by the crude method of counting patents) readily shows a greater number made by Americans than by those of any other nationality. Military historians often agree that the beginning of modern warfare occurred in the American Civil War; think of these innovations-iron-clad warships, fixed ammunition, naval guns with rifling, mass- produced uniforms and shoes, movement of troops by railroad, aerial observation, telegraph communication between headquarters and the front, photography, gas warfare, machine guns, and so on down a long list. No better index of American technological innovation could be found. We must keep in mind that until almost the end of the nineteenth century, technology and engineering did not in general depend on the applications of pure science, by which I mean the discovery of new scientific principles. This was the era of empirical innovation and the time of mechanical invention. A typical major invention was barbed wire (Glidden's patent of 1874), based on a device for twisting two strands of wire with occasional barbed spurs. This wire made homesteading possible; in the great plains there was no supply of wood or stone for use in fencing off ploughed land to protect it from cattle. The reaper and sewing machine and the Colt revolver are other examples of this "mechanical" type of invention. Yet as early as the 1840's, the applications of scientific discovery were beginning to be of importance. As a type may I cite the telegraph and photography-both depend- ing on recent discoveries in the pure sciences of physics and chemistry. From then Downloaded by guest on September 29, 2021 668 ANTHROPOLOGY: 1. B. COHEN PROC. N. A. S. until now, with constant acceleration for about one hundred years, America has excelled in the applications of science-but not necessarily the science she has herself produced. It is often assumed that the tradition in America has been one of engineering opposed to science, of applied rather than pure science. This point of view is misleading, not only because engineering had little to do with science during most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it is also wrong because in the Colonial period and well into the middle of the nineteenth century, our colleges trained no engineers. Until well into the 1840's, there was a conspicuous lack of interest in America in any form of engineering. When George Washington assumed command of the Continental army in Cambridge and surveyed his troops, he at once wrote a letter describing his two major needs: gunpowder (not then manufactured in Amer- ica) and engineers "to supervise the works." Franklin's first two jobs on arriving in France were to get gunpowder and to recruit from the "corps de g6nie" some trained military engineers-chief among them were Louis DuPortail who laid out Valley Forge and was in large measure responsible for the plans at Yorktown. When the war was won, DuPortail drew up plans for a national academy of military engineering to be established at West Point. There was then founded the United States Military Philosophical Society, dedicated to the sciences of war and of peace, America's first national scientific academy. Both did not survive very long. When the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was revived after 1812, it long remained the only training center for engineers of any sort in America. That explains why the railroads were all laid out by Army men: there weren't any other engineers in this country save for a few men trained in Europe. One American, Charles Storer Storrow, had the good fortune to be able to attend the Ecole Na- tionale des Ponts et Chauss6es in Paris; his services were so much in demand as consultant for canal building, and the use of water for industrial purposes, that he quickly built one of the great American fortunes. America's first engineering school was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (founded in 1824).