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ReseaRch a n d developmenT In T h e aR m y 15
of rocket and missile development at Picatinny and Rock Island arsenals. In some
cases, though rare, laboratory research in the arsenals extended the frontiers of
knowledge in highly esoteric fields. In the early 1970s, for example, researchers
at Watervliet Arsenal began studying superconductivity. Although it did not
lead to any immediate practical results, this work produced new classes of stable
superconducting materials that manifested superior electrical and magnetic
properties.
Changing Institutional Patterns of Army Research and
Development after World War II
That the arsenals maintained a close working relationship between R&D
and production is understandable, given their mandate to provide the Army
with the most technologically advanced ordnance and weapons delivery systems.
What is perhaps more unusual, however, is the extent to which the arsenals
maintained this culture of innovation during the postwar period, especially
given the pressures exerted by the Army Staff and influential civilian scientists
to separate research and development from production. 12 Emphasis on the rapid
development and mass production of weapons during the war had forced the
arsenals to relinquish most long-range, undirected research to the private sector.
Established in 1941, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)
spearheaded this readjustment. It coordinated and distributed to universities
and industrial firms federal funds for research in the physical sciences. “[M]uch
of our basic research,” wrote an Army officer stationed at Frankford Arsenal in
1943, “has been abandoned for the time being, in favor of applied research that
might be termed more precisely, industrial engineering. The Army is therefore,
more dependent upon universities and industrial laboratories for amplification
of the research aspects of its many problems.” OSRD managed more than two
hundred research projects on behalf of the Ordnance Department during the
war, including, among others, studies of the kinetics of nitration of chemicals
12 The same trends also guided R&D policy in American industry after the war. Committed to the
separation of research and development from production, corporate executives invested large sums of
money in the construction and staffing of state-of-the-art laboratories located far away from manufacturing
operations. Although such efforts typically produced a wealth of knowledge in diverse fields of science
and technology, they contributed far less to the development of new products and commercial markets.
In many cases, research in the engineering disciplines proved to be more valuable to the development of
new products than even the most advanced basic research. See Hounshell, “The Evolution of Industrial
Research in the United States,” 45–51. Useful case studies include David A. Hounshell and John Kenly
Smith Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988); John W. Servos, “Changing Partners: The Mellon Institute, Private Industry, and the Federal
Patron,” Technology and Culture 35 (April 1994): 221–57; Stuart W. Leslie, “Blue Collar Science: Bringing
the Transistor to Life in the Lehigh Valley,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32
(2001): 71–113; Scott G. Knowles and Stuart W. Leslie, “‘Industrial Versailles’: Eero Saarinen’s Corporate
Campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T,” Isis 92 (March 2001): 1–33; and Margaret B. W. Graham and Alec
T. Shuldiner, Corning and the Craft of Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). A similar
strategy also guided R&D policy in science-based manufacturing firms that received weapons contracts
from the Department of Defense. For an excellent analysis of the impact of military contracting on R&D
in the defense industry after World War II, see Glen Ross Asner, “The Cold War and American Industrial
Research” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2006).