Minggu, 19 Desember 2010

Military versus Civil Technologies

The exchange of technical ideas between the military world and the civilian world can be found throughout the history of technology, from the defensive machines of Archimedes in Syracuse about 250 BC, through the first application of the telescope by Galileo in military and commercial intelligence, to the application of nuclear fission to both weaponry and power production. In the twentieth century, as the military establishments of the great powers sought to harness inventive capabilities, they turned to precedents in the commercial and academic world, seeking new ways to organize research and development. By the 1960s, the phrase ‘‘technology transfer’’ described the exchange of technique and device between civilian and military cultures, as well as between one nation and another, and provided a name for the phenomenon that had always characterized the development of tools, technique, process, and application.

Until late in the nineteenth century, the process of invention itself was traditionally viewed in much the same light as the process of scientific discovery. That is, writers on the topic focused on the inspired individual who, by application of intuition and intellect, solved a particular mechanical or developmental problem in his (or her) head and then worked to implement the innovation through iterative trial and error until a perfected resolution was achieved. The literature tended to present such tales as moral lessons, showing that virtues of dedication, hard work, and persistence in the face of skepticism and tradition eventually conquered obstacles, leading either to financial reward and fame or to belated recognition. More often than not, well into the twentieth century, such tales were also presented as a gloss on national virtues, with British precedents stressed in works authored by Britons, American genius dominating the works of authors in the U.S., and similar echoes of national pride found in the recorded achievements of Italians, Russians, Germans, and others. Furthermore, the process of invention was viewed as an extension of the ‘‘great man’’ school of historical writing that dominated historiography of politics and statehood. Rarely did scholars look behind the biographical narrative of the scientist or technological inventive genius to try to uncover the cultural, social, or psychological roots of invention and their cross application in military and civilian spheres.

However, as technological challenges and opportunities became more complex in the late nineteenth century, the locus of achievement subtly changed from the lone genius to the team and to the accumulation of component innovations into ever more complex systems. Academics, businesses, and the military alike began to establish institutions in which programmed problems would be solved and the applications worked out in group settings. The ‘‘invention factory’’ established in 1876 by Thomas Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, although often cited in American literature as the precedent for such an approach, was part of a much larger international movement. In Britain, the Admiralty supported the construction of a model basin or towing tank by William Froude, allowing him to move from his self-financed experiments at Torquay to a staffed center at Haslar. The U.S. Navy established a smokeless powder research program at a torpedo station in Newport, Rhode Island. The German technical school at Charlottenberg established an engineering station that served as a model for an American engine laboratory built by the Navy. American land grant colleges supported agricultural experiment stations in the 1880s. Russian, Italian, British, and German institutions connected with naval research or academic institutions and sometimes funded by industrialists like Nobel, Diesel, and the Du Ponts were all in place around the turn of the twentieth century, proliferating widely in the decade from 1900 to 1910.

Although writers and the general public may have persisted in the perception that invention was the action of the lone genius, businesses and governments alike recognized that the growing complexity of technological progress often required the application of skills from a wide variety of disciplines. They set up shops, laboratories, institutes, and project offices to foster technical creativity. Even when inventions were produced by laboratories or team efforts, however, the quest for heroes in the public mind required that Americans believe that Edison invented the light bulb while the British attributed it to Joseph Swan, that Italians believe that Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy, and that the French, British, Americans, and Germans believe that their own scientists had single-handedly invented such component-rich devices as the photographic camera, the automobile, and the dirigible balloon. In fact, all such complex inventions, with both military and civilian applications, were the product of team invention, the exchange and cross-licensing of patents, and the international flow of purloined, imitated, and sometimes legitimately purchased technology transfer.

The world of weaponry had grown by similar combinations of individual innovation, accretion of parts, and exchange of ideas. A major improvement to naval guns came in 1851 with a design developed by John Dahlgren, an American naval officer. Reasoning that the greatest force of the burning charge was at the breech of the weapon, Dahlgren designed a gun with a thick breech around the bore and a thinner barrel further toward the muzzle. Yet to bring his device to completion required skilled craftsmen, shop workers, and metallurgists. A process developed in the 1850s by T.J. Rodman at the West Point Foundry cast the guns on a hollow core. Rodman and his crew allowed the guns to cool from the inside, greatly strengthening the inner side of the barrel. A secure, screw-breech system for loading artillery was first patented by B. Chambers in 1849 in the U.S. With the development of smokeless powder in the 1890s and with the discovery of the ideal formula for the material by Dmitri Mendeleev, designers sought to improve the breech loading system to allow for rapid firing and reloading, and several rapid-fire designs came into use after 1895. At least five different rapidfire breech-loading designs were developed in Germany, Britain, Russia, and the U.S. in the 1890s. Although some were named after their individual inventors, all were the product of group efforts both in machining and in testing. Only in the twentieth century, however, did most armies and navies begin to designate their weapons by ‘‘Mark’’ numbers, sometimes retaining an individual name along with it. Thus, the U.S. introduced the M-1 rifle in the 1930s, but also designated it the ‘‘Garand.’’

Some authors have continued to argue that most inventions come from the individual or at most, the small firm. In a study produced in 1969, John Jewkes of Oxford University detailed the case histories of 75 twentieth century inventions, ranging from acrylic fibers through to the zipper, and showed that a large proportion of them were conceived and developed by individuals or small firms, not by industrial or military facilities. The focus of Jewkes’ work tended to be civilian technologies such as the antibiotic penicillin and the gasoline additive tetraethyl lead, rather than devices conceived for military purposes. Behind the persistent public mythology of the lone heroic inventor, the research and development laboratories of the technology corporations, the naval establishments, the armories, and the government-funded experiment stations sought means to program or schedule the process of invention. For some it seemed unlikely that the head of an organization could ‘‘order’’ progress. Alexander Fleming, the British researcher who accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928, believed that ‘‘a team is the worst possible way’’ of conducting research. Thomas Midgely, however, who tracked down tetraethyl lead to add to gasoline as a means to eliminate engine ‘‘knock,’’ was always ready to describe how his discovery, although accidental, came out of a funded, directed, and tedious process in which a team employed by C.F. Kettering of Delco explored alternate chemicals over the period 1919 to 1921. Kettering recognized that the knocking of early four-stroke internal combustion engines varied with fuel and that some chemical additive might reduce or eliminate the problem. In effect, Midgely produced a discovery (and an invention, in the process of making tetraethyl lead), on order. Kettering himself was a firm believer in putting experts together and tying the efforts of academically trained specialists to the practical experience of mechanics, tinkerers, and experienced craftsmen. Setting up such a group and then giving them a problem to solve was the essence of the new invention-on-order system emerging in twentieth century laboratories and workshops.

Penicillin, although discovered by Fleming individually, was not produced as a medicine until nearly 15 years after its discovery, and this was only through the hard work of a team working in the period from 1939 to 1943. That group included Australian-born Howard Florey and German-born Ernst B. Chain who found a way to produce purified penicillin, the active ingredient in the mold that Fleming had identified. Florey and Chain worked initially at Oxford University. Chain identified the chemical structure of crystalline penicillin and identified four different types. From 1941 to 1943, Florey worked with staff of the Research Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Peoria, Illinois, developing methods for production. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the complete process of discovery and isolation of the antibiotic. In this case, the interaction of the military and civilian spheres was demonstrated in the vastly increased need for a drug to combat infection and disease brought on by World War II. Florey himself first worked on field tests among wounded combat victims in Sicily and Tunisia.

The identification of talent, establishing of research direction (or definition of a research problem), and management of the team effort have all presented difficult issues for industrial, academic, and military laboratories and their research and development (R&D) activities. Since interdisciplinary work is often required among people with training in varied fields such as chemistry, mechanics, computer technology, materials sciences, and others; merely structuring a team and managing it may present difficulties. Establishing a shared vocabulary sometimes requires team members to break out of their disciplines and learn to convey specialized data and concepts in the language of generalists. One common solution to the organizational issue has been to house the specialists in departments with a disciplinary focus and then to assign them to projects on a temporary basis, in a socalled matrix organization that exists for the length of the project or development. An extension of this principle in the late twentieth century was to draw specialists from entirely different organizations in academia, the military, and in industry to work on the same project while they collected their salaries from the home organizations. In such situations, ‘‘integrated project teams’’ (IPTs) were created for the duration of a developmental project. IPTs proliferated in military technology development efforts in the 1990s.

Although cases of technology transfer from civilian applications to the military and vice-versa can be identified, the creation of new technology specifically for a military application is very rarely a simple matter. Converting the civilian discovery of nuclear fission to a workable nuclear weapon occurred fairly promptly. Fission was identified in December of 1938, and the first test of a device that could be fitted into a weapon case was held in July 1945. The Manhattan Engineer District, formed in 1942, consolidated work at numerous civilian and military facilities into a single project, managed as a large enterprise, all conducted behind a screen of security. Although penetrated by Soviet agents, the American project remained unknown to the Germans and to the Japanese until the first weapon was detonated over Hiroshima in August 1945. Even so, it involved tens of thousands of construction workers and hundreds of engineers and scientists, and it was conducted at research and production facilities scattered across the U.S. and Canada.

The Manhattan Project has often been regarded as the first case of ‘‘big science’’ in the U.S.,
although prior projects to build a cyclotron at the University of California in the 1930s, to construct a 200-inch (5-meter) telescope for Mt. Palomar in Pasadena, the Soviet and German efforts to construct a nuclear weapon, and the German project to build the V-2 rocket at Peenemunde were precedents or contemporary in nature. What characterized the so-called big science projects was massive funding, the organization of hundreds if not thousands of specialists, and the pursuit of a specific technological goal, all on a massive budget.

Despite such vast projects involving many different specialists, the persistence of the ‘‘great man’’ mythology elevated the administrators and lead scientists of such projects to the rank of historical figures. Thus J. Robert Oppenheimer became known as the ‘‘father of the bomb,’’ while similar roles were attributed to such science and technology administrators as Werner Heisenberg, Igor Kurchatov, and Wernher von Braun. Even the concept that such massive projects represented big science was itself a matter of debate in later years. Were such applications of scientific method actually scientific endeavors, or were they the work of engineers? In fact, the task of building the nuclear weapon represented a case of the application, not the discovery, of scientific theory, and the design of machinery and processes to build a working weapon. Although there was no such field as ‘‘nuclear engineering’’ in 1938, the work done by the teams at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, at Hanford and Oak Ridge in the U.S., and at Montreal and Chalk River in Canada were all engineering tasks. Scientists working as engineers and cooperating with industrial engineers and chemical engineers from such firms as DuPont collaborated with civil engineers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Together they designed production reactors to make plutonium and separation plants to isolate fissionable uranium-235 from the more plentiful isotope uranium-238, and they built the ‘‘gadgets’’ themselves. Regarded as a triumph of science and the work of notable physicists (Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Neddermeyer, Eugene Paul Wigner, and others), in fact the weapon and the work involved in its creation was an immense engineering task.

In the U.S. following World War II, the administrator of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), Dr. Vannevar Bush, published a work that was highly influential in capturing the sense that ‘‘science had won the war.’’ Science, The Endless Frontier, published both as a report on the work of the OSRD and then as a popular work to build political support for a continued effort to fund science, made the clear argument that science had to precede application and that research had to precede development. For a generation in the U.S., Britain, and Canada, funding for military advances was directed to ‘‘research and development’’ projects. In fact, most of those projects represented the application of existing technology and established science rather than efforts to fund pure, basic, or abstract science, as advocated by Bush. Even so, engineers were baffled by the emphasis in the popular pres and in the minds of government administrators on ‘‘rocket science’’ and on the vocabulary that insisted that research preceded science. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s in both the U.S. and Britain, a lively discussion emerged over the sources of invention that challenged the Bush paradigm of science leading technology toward innovation. The Project Hindsight report in 1969 by Chalmers Sherwin and Raymond Isenson captured many criticisms of the Bush paradigm. The report by Sherwin, a preliminary version of which was published in the journal Science in 1967, stirred up a hornet’s nest of responses and letters. A follow-up study by the Illinois Institute of Technology, known as the TRACES Report in 1969, demonstrated the ultimate scientific basis for many technological advances. However, the debate continued in both the U.S. and Britain, leading to close studies by I.C.R. Byatt and A.V. Cohen in 1969, M. Gibbons and R.D. Johnston in 1972, J. Langrish in 1972, and F.R. Jevons in 1976, all of which concluded that very few important recent inventions could be attributed to advances in science.

The issue was no sterile debate between the two professions; it had serious implications for the funding of military R&D in both Britain and the U.S. In the U.S., the compromise was typicallybureaucratic. In the military appropriation budgets, the Defense Department established a continuum from Basic Research, funded in a budget category or ‘‘budget element’’ 6.1 in the military appropriation budgets, through Applied Research (6.2), Advanced Technology Development (6.3), Demonstration and Validation (6.4), Engineering and Manufacturing Development (6.5), Management Support (6.6), and Operational Systems Development (6.7). Although the categories evolved over the period from the 1960s through the 1990s, by 1993 the pattern persisted. However, the 6.1 category of Basic Research received a very low proportion of defense budgeting, with far greater amounts proposed (and funded) in each budget cycle for categories 6.3 through 6.5. Although science was given priority of place in the intellectual scheme, in the practical world the dollars went into the costly work involved in actually building weapons and devices rather than maintaining the scientist at his bench in the laboratory.

This budgetary scheme reflected the historical reality. When Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch conceived of the idea of nuclear fission in 1938, they did so over the telephone between Stockholm and Copenhagen, while on Christmas vacation away from any expensive facilities. Seven years later, the Manhattan Project had spent 2 billion dollars to construct an industry and a device implementing the concept. Despite the fact that pure science tends to be less expensive than the construction of weapons or weapons platforms, a continuing debate remains over the degree to which basic research budget categories within the military appropriation request should be expanded.

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