The Political Economy of Discovery Stories: The Case of Dr Irving Langmuir and General Electric

Summary

The rhetorical uses of discovery and invention stories are legion, but of particular concern in this paper are those that are deployed for economic or commercial reasons, especially in claiming intellectual property rights, usually in the form of patents. The case of stories about Dr Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) of the General Electric Research Laboratory, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1932 and was the first industry-based laureate from the United States, is examined. Langmuir won the prize for his ‘outstanding discoveries and inventions within the field of surface chemistry’, which also happened to underlie the virtual monopoly that General Electric gained in the supply of electric light. Langmuir was the inspiration for the stereotypically absent-minded and disinterested character of Dr Felix Hoenikker in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle (1963). My case study focuses on this and other representations of Langmuir as a discoverer, especially those generated by the General Electric Company, and explores the utility of these representations for Langmuir himself, and for his employer, in corporate PR, in ongoing struggles over patents, and in the post-war organisation of R&D. It is argued that, while the era of corporate research produced new collective modes of discovery and invention their description in heroic, individualistic terms long continued, and for good reason.

Acknowledgements

Early versions of this paper were presented to the Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in December 2005 and to the British Society for the History of Science Conference, University of Kent, Canterbury in July 2006. I thank the audiences on both occasions for their helpful responses. Discussions with P. Thomas Carroll, Jeffrey Sturchio and Steven Shapin were much appreciated, and I thank the anonymous referees for their helpful criticism. A Discovery Project Grant, awarded by the Australian Research Council, supported the research for this paper.

Notes

¹Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Playboy Interview, July 1973, reprinted in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) (New York, 1974), 266–7.

²Kurt Vonnegut Jr, ‘Address to the American Physical Society [1969]’, in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) (New York, 1974), 91–102 at 96–97.

³Many of the transposed stories concerned the supposed absent-mindedness and eccentricity of Langmuir, such as the occasion when, caught in a traffic jam, he reputedly simply left his car in the middle of the road and walked to work. [Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (New York, 1998, originally published 1963), 30–1]. In a delightful completion of the circle, Bernard Vonnegut decided to refer in a published paper to a dimensionless number he named after Langmuir as the ‘Hoenikker number’—an interesting example of pseudonymous eponymy.

⁴David Philip Miller, ‘The “Sobel Effect”’, Metascience, 11 (2002), 185–200. For more moderate treatments of this and related issues see Paola Govoni, ‘Historians of Science and the “Sobel Effect”’, Journal of Science Communication, 4 (March 2005), accessed at http://jcom.sissa.it/ and Steven Shapin, ‘Hyperprofessionalism and the Crisis of Readership in the History of Science’, Isis, 96 (2005), 238–43. Kenneth L. Caneva, ‘“Discovery” as a Site for the Collective Construction of Scientific Knowledge’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 35 (2005), 175–291, provides a very thorough and insightful entry into discovery literature in the history of science.

⁵Simon Schaffer, ‘Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy’, Social Studies of Science, 16 (1986), 387–420, at 397.

⁶See, for example, the diagnosis of the impetus behind the contest in the mid-nineteenth century between the supporters of Henry Cavendish, on the one hand, and James Watt, on the other, as long posthumous candidates for the title of discoverer of the compound nature of water in David Philip Miller, Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Water Controversy’ (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2004).

⁷David Philip Miller, ‘“Puffing Jamie”: The Commercial and Ideological Importance of Being a Philosopher in the Case of James Watt (1736–1819)’, History of Science, 38 (2000), 1–24, and idem, ‘Watt in Court: Specifying Steam Engines and Classifying Engineers in the Patent Trials of the 1790s’, History of Technology, 27 (2006), 43–76.

⁸See, for example, W. Bernard Carlson, ‘Innovation and the Modern Corporation: From Heroic Invention to Industrial Science’, in Science in the Twentieth Century, edited by John Krige and Dominique Pestre (Amsterdam, 1997), 203–26.

⁹Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago, IL, 2008).

¹⁰For an interesting and important account of the history of the linear model, including examination of its rhetorical value for groups sponsoring and propagating it, see Benoit Godin, ‘The Linear Model of Innovation: The Historical Construction of an Analytical Framework’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 31 (2006), 639–67. For an important, contrary, claim that the linear model never existed even as rhetoric for historical actors in industry and science, see David Edgerton, ‘“The Linear Model” Did not Exist. Reflections on the History and Historiography of Science and Research in Industry in the Twentieth Century’, in The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, edited by Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs and Sven Widmalm (Sagamore Beach, MA, 2004), 31–57.

¹¹The major secondary sources on Langmuir, from which the following account is drawn up, are: Albert Rosenfeld, The Quintessence of Irving Langmuir (Oxford, 1966), which originally appeared in volume 12 of, The Collected Works of Irving Langmuir, 12 Vols., edited by C. Guy Suits (Oxford, 1962); C.G. Suits and M.J. Martin, ‘Irving Langmuir’, Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 45 (1974), 215–47; Leonard S. Reich, ‘Irving Langmuir and the Pursuit of Science and Technology in the Corporate Environment’, Technology and Culture, 24 (1983), 199–221; George Wise, ‘Ionists in Industry: Physical Chemistry at General Electric, 1900–1915’, Isis, 74 (1983), 7–21; Robert E. Kohler, ‘Irving Langmuir and the Octet Theory of Valence’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 4 (1974), 39–87; Charles Süsskind, ‘Irving Langmuir’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography VIII (1973), 22–5. Virginia Veeder Westervelt, Incredible Man of Science (New York, 1968) is a delightful rendition of Langmuir's life for young people. It conveys the usual stories about Langmuir and includes a number of engaging fictionalised conversations in which Langmuir explains his discoveries and scientific principles to his wife (on their honeymoon) and to his daughter (over the washing up). An air of genial eccentricity pervades the persona as rendered here. The same is true of Langmuir's World, a documentary film made by one of Langmuir's grandsons, Robert B. Summerhayes, which is nevertheless immensely interesting and valuable.

¹²Accessible at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZdZUouzBY

¹³Langmuir's talk was given originally at GE's The Knolls Research Laboratory on 18 December 1953. The text is usefully reproduced as I. Langmuir, ‘Pathological Science’, Physics Today, 42 (October 1989), 36–48. See, among recent uses of the concept: Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford, 2000), 38; Christina Hoff Summers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men (New York, 2001), 100. Langmuir's criteria seem to appeal most to conservative critics of what they diagnose as ‘dud science’ in the service of what they excoriate as ‘political correctness’.

¹⁴On Steinmetz see Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, MD, 1992), and Sender Garlin, Charles P. Steinmetz, Scientist and Socialist (1865–1923), Including the Complete Steinmetz-Lenin Correspondence (New York, 1977).

¹⁵See, for example, Charles P. Steinmetz, ‘The Individual and Corporate Development of Industry’, General Electric Review, 18 (August 1915), 813–6. There are detectable similarities between Steinmetz's depiction of the relationship between the individual and the corporation and Langmuir's later version of that relationship expressed in the concept of ‘serendipity’ as discussed below.

¹⁶This is a key point of John M. Jordan, ‘“Society Improved the Way You Can Improve a Dynamo”: Charles P. Steinmetz and the Politics of Efficiency’, Technology and Culture, 30 (1989), 57–82, esp. 62–5. See also David E. Nye, Image Worlds; Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 107, and Henry Petroski, ‘Images of an Engineer’, American Scientist, 79 (1991): 300–3. Jordan notes John Dos Passos's portrayal of Steinmetz as coopted by the corporation: ‘All his life Steinmetz was a piece of apparatus belonging to General Electric … General Electric humoured him, let him be a Socialist, … and the publicity department talked up the wizard, the medicine man who knew the secrets to Ali Baba's cave … and they let him be a Socialist and believe that society could be improved the way you can improve a dynamo … and Steinmetz was the most valuable piece of apparatus General Electric had until he wore out and died’. [John Dos Passos, The 42 ^nd Parallel (New York, 1958), 334, as quoted in Jordan, 65, no. 22].

¹⁷Nye, (note 16), 60.

¹⁸It is suggested by some that Reagan's work for General Electric made his political career and his political style in more ways than one. See Christopher J. Matthews, ‘Your Host, Ronald Reagan: From G.E. Theater to the Desk in the Oval Office’, The New Republic, 190 (26 March 1984), 15–19. There were, of course, other vehicles for stories about GE research and Langmuir. Textbooks would be an interesting case study as well as popular science literature.

¹⁹See Irving Langmuir, ‘Blackening of Tungsten Lamps and Methods of Preventing it’, General Electric Review, 16 (October 1913), 688–; idem.,‘The Pure Electron Discharge and its Applications in Radio Telegraphy and Telephony’, General Electric Review, 18 (May 1915), 327–39; idem., ‘The Characteristics of Tungsten Filaments as Functions of Temperature’, General Electric Review, 19 (March 1916), 208–12; idem., ‘The Condensation Pump: An Improved Form of High Vacuum Pump’, General Electric Review, 19 (December 1916), 1060–71. All these papers present original research discovering the fundamental principles upon which practical effects are based. One of the few occasions when Langmuir allowed himself to be cast in a didactic or service role (in the forum of the Review) was in his paper ‘The Flicker of Incandescent Lamps on Alternating Current Circuits and Stroboscopic Effects’, General Electric Review, 17 (March 1914), 294–300. Langmuir states the aim of this paper as being ‘to call the attention of lighting engineers to some of the most important of Corbino's formulas and to modify … these in such a way that they may be of more direct application to lighting problems …’ (294). Most papers in the Review from Research Laboratory staff were of this service type.

²¹Irving Langmuir, ‘Address of Acceptance, William H. Nichols Medal Award’, The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 7 (April 1915), 349. My perusal of Langmuir's laboratory notebooks, and the surviving notebooks of Samuel P. Sweetser, convince me that Langmuir was here giving credit where it was due. See, notebooks for 23 November 1909–11 August 1910, 11 August 1910–21 March 1911 (Container 44) for the early collaboration of Langmuir and Sweetser, and 30 December 1919–19 January 1921 (Container 46) for their mature working relationship. Of a number of Sweetser's own notebooks, see especially that for 15 August 1927– [?] (Container 48), all in Irving Langmuir Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

²⁰There were many of these. Langmuir received fifteen honorary degrees. His medals and other awards were: Nichols Medal, American Chemical Society 1915 and 1920; Hughes Medal, Royal Society of London 1918; Rumford Medal, AAAS 1920; Stanislao Cannizzaro Award, Royal National Academy of Linnaeus (Rome) 1925; Perkin Medal, Society of Chemical Industry (American Section) 1928; Chandler Medal, Columbia University 1929; Willard Gibbs Medal, American Chemical Society, 1930; Nobel Prize, Swedish Academy, 1932; Popular Science Monthly Award 1933; Franklin Medal, Franklin Institute 1934; Holley Medal, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1934; John Scott Medal, Philadelphia Board of Directors of City Trusts, 1937; Faraday Medal, Chemical Society (London) 1938; Egleston Medal, Columbia University Engineering Schools Alumni Association 1939; Modern Pioneer of Industry, National Association of Manufacturers, 1940; Faraday Medal, Institution of Electrical Engineers 1943; Medal of Merit, US Army and Navy 1948; Mascart Medal, Academy des Science, Société Française des Electriciens 1948; John J. Carty Medal, National Academy of Science 1949.

²²George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research (New York, 1985), 101.

²³ In the United States Patent Office Interferences Dempster vs Ladoff Interference No. 26,482-A, Ladoff vs Dempster, Interference No. 26483-B, Weedon vs Ladoff vs Dempster, Interference No. 26,485-D. Arc Light Electrode. Volume 1, Ladoff's Testimony (1907), 90. The copy I consulted is held in the National Archives, Washington, DC, Patent Appellate Cases, U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia, Record Group 276, Box 144. On Ladoff's fascinating career and the significance of the imbroglio with General Electric, see my paper ‘From Siberian Exile to the Heart of Corporate Capitalism: Isador Ladoff (1857–1918), Socialist, and his Patent Litigation with the General Electric Company’ (Under submission).

²⁴See the comments of E.W. Rice and Steinmetz at a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1909: ‘The Patent System in its Relation to Industrial Development’, Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 28 (Part 1) (Jan–June 1909), 315–39, with discussion 340–353, at 348–9.

²⁶Langmuir, Collected Works, volume 12, 251.

²⁵Irving Langmuir, ‘Atomic Hydrogen as an Aid to Industrial Research’, Science, 67, No. 1730 (February 1928), 201–8. This was published in a number of other places.

²⁷Langmuir, Collected Works, volume 12, 252.

²⁸Langmuir, Collected Works, volume 12, 252

²⁹Langmuir, Collected Works, volume 12, 253.

³⁰Langmuir, Collected Works, volume 12, 260.

³¹Langmuir, Collected Works, volume 12, 260–1.

³³Irving Langmuir —Banquet Speech, Stockholm, 10 December 1932. Accessed at http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1932 there taken from Carl Gustaf Santesson, Les Prix Nobel en 1932 (Stockholm, 1933).

³²Irving Langmuir, ‘Surface Chemistry. Nobel Lecture, December 14, 1932’. Accessed at http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1932

³⁴‘The Inquisitive Man’, Time, 16 January 1950, 34.

³⁵See Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, CA, 1998) and Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, CA, 1985). In the latter work (239–241) Marchand elucidates the use of the ‘window onto the future’ trope and the role of the scientist within it. The same clear gaze that sees (and provides) the future sees into the heart of the workings of nature to lay out and make that future. See also Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (Basic Books, 1998), 216.

³⁶Large corporations by virtue of their size and diversity were difficult to manage if they harboured a multiplicity of divergent objectives and self-conceptions. When they had been assembled in part, as had GE, by take-overs there could be strong residual loyalty to the sub-units. The development and constant reiteration of the monogram trademark ‘GE’ and the direction of institutional advertising inwards were responses to this problem. See Roland Marchand, ‘The Inward Thrust of Institutional Advertising: General Electric and General Motors in the 1920s’, Business and Economic History, 2^nd series 18 (1989), 188–196. A key study of General Electric's public relations based on its vast photographic collection is Nye, (note 16).

³⁷Wise (note 22), 275–276. It perhaps attenuates Wise's critique when we note, as Shapin does, that research managers were often in the business of saying that the best way to direct a research effort was to be non-directive. See Shapin, (note 9), 203–4.

³⁸Wise (note 22), 276–7.

³⁹W.R. Whitney, ‘Langmuir's Work’, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 20 (March 1928), 329–32.

⁴¹Whitney (note 39), 330. In subsequent journalistic accounts, this frequently became a saving of a billion dollars a year rather than the approximately one-third of a billion implied by Whitney's analysis. It is possible that by the stage that Time magazine quoted the billion a year figure in 1950, the usage of electric lamps would have expanded to an extent that would have made it a reasonably accurate figure., 330.

⁴⁰Whitney (note 39), 330. In subsequent journalistic accounts, this frequently became a saving of a billion dollars a year rather than the approximately one-third of a billion implied by Whitney's analysis. It is possible that by the stage that Time magazine quoted the billion a year figure in 1950, the usage of electric lamps would have expanded to an extent that would have made it a reasonably accurate figure.

⁴²Whitney (note 39), 330. In subsequent journalistic accounts, this frequently became a saving of a billion dollars a year rather than the approximately one-third of a billion implied by Whitney's analysis. It is possible that by the stage that Time magazine quoted the billion a year figure in 1950, the usage of electric lamps would have expanded to an extent that would have made it a reasonably accurate figure, 330–1.

⁴³Willis R. Whitney, ‘Irving Langmuir, Scientist’, Current History, 37 (March 1933), 705–10, at 705–7.

⁴⁴Willis R. Whitney, ‘Irving Langmuir, Scientist’, Current History, 37 (March 1933), 705–10, at 705–7, 706. On the idea of a moratorium on research see Carroll W. Pursell Jr, ‘“A Savage Struck by Lightning”: The Idea of a Research Moratorium, 1927–37’,Lex et Scientia, 10 (1974), 146–58, and also idem, ‘Government and Technology in the Great Depression’, Technology and Culture, 20 (1979), 162–174.

⁴⁵Leonard S. Reich, ‘Edison, Coolidge and Langmuir: Evolving Approaches to American Industrial Research’, The Journal of Economic History, 47 (1987), 341–51, at 348–9.

⁴⁶See Donald E. Stokes, Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC, 1997), 21–2. Pickstone neatly states that ‘to regard his [Langmuir's] industrial work as applied science is probably an “academicist” distortion’. Rather, Pickstone suggests, Langmuir's research is an example of ‘the creation of “model set-ups” that could be exploited for various purposes, both for principles and for practice’. [See John V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester, 2000), 173]. See also, George Wise, ‘Heat Transfer Research in General Electric, 1910–1960: Examples of the Product Driven Innovation Cycle’, in History of Heat Transfer: Essays in Honor of the 50 ^th Anniversary of the ASME Heat Transfer Division, edited by Edwin T. Layton and John H. Lienhard (New York, 1988), 189–211.

⁴⁷See, for example, Langmuir's Laboratory Notebook No. 2 (23 November 1909 to 11 August 1910), 75, 106, 175–6 (for clear evidence of Langmuir seeking and receiving inputs shaping laboratory work from the production side of the Company); 121, 187–96 (for his early interactions with the patent department). (Irving Langmuir Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 44). Rather than seeing service activities, or considerations of patentability, as impositions, Langmuir saw them as opportunities to develop research, but to do so in a way relevant to production and economic issues. The Langmuir papers are a remarkably rich, under-exploited resource.

⁴⁸In seeking to manage the press, rather than being reported by it or falling victim to it, Langmuir and Whitney were being thoroughly modern scientists, of course. See Dorothy Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology (New York, 1987). On public images of science during this period and how they were produced see Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science our Own: Public Images of Science 1910–1955 (Chicago, IL, 1990).

⁴⁹Roland Marchand and Michael L. Smith, ‘Corporate Science on Display’, in Scientific Authority & Twentieth-Century America, edited by Ronald G. Walters (Baltimore, MD, 1997), 148–82 at 160–4; Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago, 2005), 59–61.

⁵⁰Advertisement ‘More Goods for More People’, General Electric, 1936, accessible at http://newdeal.feri.org/ads/lge836.gif

⁵¹This may have been so because of the lack of emphasis on individuals in many of the advertisements, and the possibility of reading the portrayal of GE's ‘scientists, engineers and workers’ as endorsement of collective action. It does appear that there may have been fewer concessions to such sentiments in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, but only a more sustained examination of GE's advertising than is currently possible for me would confirm or deny this. It is plausible that GE adopted collective representations of its work at times when major upheavals put a premium on the sentiment of solidarity. We see later in this paper that William H. Whyte, in his critique in the 1950s of what he took to be corporate tendencies toward collectivism, appeared to be reacting to corporate emphasis on teamwork. Whyte would almost certainly have read these adverts of the late 1930s as having that sort of emphasis.

⁵²Marchand and Smith, (note 49), 163.

⁵³See Roland Marchand, ‘The Designers go to the Fair: Walter Dorwin Teague and the Professionalization of Corporate Industrial Exhibits, 1933–1940’, Design Issues, 7 (1991), 4–17.

⁵⁴See Robert W. Rydell, ‘The Fan Dance of Science: American World's Fairs in the Great Depression’, Isis, 76 (1985), 525–42.

⁵⁵Clips from the film are used in Langmuir's World, (note 11). The Langmuir film shown at the World's Fair was not a direct GE production, emanating instead from the newly-founded American Institute of Motion Pictures. It was the first of a number of films on Nobel Prize winners produced by the founder of the AIMP, Edward Lawrence Dorfman. The films were described as follows: ‘Each picture will contain a résumé of events in the life of the scientist involved and an explanation of the particular type of research and experimentation in which he is engaged. By pictorial illustration and the use of simple language the pictures will demonstrate to the layman the benefits which he derives as a result of scientific exploration …’. (‘The March of Science’, New York Times, 9 April 1939, X4)

⁵⁶Peter J. Kuznick, ‘Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World's Fair’, American Quarterly, 46 (1994), 341–73.

⁵⁷See Peter J. Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America (Chicago, IL, 1987).

⁵⁸Benjamin C. Gruenberg, Science and the Public Mind (New York, 1935), 1–2, 61. Gruenberg's opening pages referred specifically to the spectacular opening of the Chicago World's Fair: ‘… you can have the front door of your exposition opened by a beam of light from the star Arcturus …’. It was the effect of this showy type of public science on the ‘public mind’ that concerned him.

⁵⁹F.R. Moulton, ‘Science by Radio’, The Scientific Monthly, 47 (December 1938), 546–8. On corporate support of science broadcasting and the ambivalence of many scientists about the demands of the medium and its audiences see Marcel. C. LaFollette, Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television (Chicago, IL, 2008).

⁶⁰For important discussions of corporate patenting see: David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977), esp. 84–109; Floyd L. Vaughan, The United States Patent System: Legal and Economic Conflicts in American Patent History (Westport, CT, 1972), reprint of 1956 edition. A useful, accessible account of the changing criteria for granting patents is Steven Lubar, ‘“New, Useful, and Nonobvious”’, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, 6 (1990), 9–16. On GE patenting see Kendall Birr, Pioneering in Industrial Research: The Story of the General Electric Research Laboratory (Washington, DC, 1957), 79–80, 146–51, and Leonard S. Reich, ‘Research, Patents and the Struggle to Control Radio: Big Business and the Uses of Industrial Research’, Business History Review, 51 (1977), 208–35, on the defensive and other uses of patents.

⁶¹ General Electric Company v. Nitro-Tungsten Lamp Company, 261 Fed. 606 (1919), 266 Fed. 994 (C.C.A. 1920). See Arthur A. Bright Jr, The Electric-Lamp Industry: Technological Change and Economic Development from 1800 to 1947 (New York, 1949), 244.

⁶²Bright, (note 61), 246. The words are those of Chief Justice Taft in United States of America v. General Electric Company, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and Westinghouse Lamp Company, 272 U.S. 476 (1926).

⁶³See Marchand, (note 35, Advertising the American Dream), 193–5.

⁶⁴On the general background to these developments see W. Rupert Maclaurin, Invention & Innovation in the Radio Industry (New York, 1949). On the specific cases see Reich, (note 60).

⁶⁵Quoted in ‘The Radio Tube Goes to Court’, New York Times, 23 November 1930, 124.

⁶⁶Brief for Langmuir, Court of Appeals of District of Columbia, Jan. Term 1924, Patent Appeal Docket #1680, Irving Langmuir Appellant vs. Harold D. Arnold, Interference #40,380, 9, as quoted in Wise, (note 11), 20.

⁶⁷The judgement in the case in which Langmuir's (GE's) claim was finally quashed, argued: the ‘great and renowned’ physicist Langmuir made many experiments to achieve the patented result but was ‘travelling all unknown to him, over a field already well explored’. Far from being evidence in his favour the articles in scientific journals and his experiments were here taken as showing his lack of knowledge of the prior art. See General Electric Co. v. De Forest Radio Co. 23 F.2d 698 (D. Del. 1928), affirmed, 283 U.S. 664 (1931). I gleaned this from Richard L. Robbins, ‘Subtests of “nonobviousness”: A Nontechnical Approach to Patent Validity’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 112 (June 1964), 1169–84 reprinted in Nonobviousness—The Ultimate Condition of Patentability, edited by John F. Witherspoon (Washington, DC, 1980).

⁷⁰Arnold, (note 69), 225–6.

⁶⁸The Monopoly Committee was formally known as the ‘Temporary National Economic Committee’, or TNEC.

⁶⁹See ‘The Personification of Corporation’, Chapter 8, in Thurman W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, CT, 1937). On Arnold see: Alan Brinkley, ‘The Antimonopoly Ideal and the Liberal State: The Case of Thurman Arnold’, Journal of American History, 80 (1993), 557–579; Spencer Weber Waller, ‘The Short Unhappy Judgeship of Thurman Arnold’, Wyoming Law Review, 3 (2003), 233–56; and also Spencer Weber Waller, Thurman Arnold: A Biography (New York, 2005).

⁷¹See Larry Owens, ‘Patents, the “Frontiers” of American Invention, and the Monopoly Committee of 1939: Anatomy of a Discourse’, Technology and Culture, 32 (1991), 1076–93.

⁷² Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1942), accessed on http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com

⁷⁴ Potts v. Coe, 145 F (2d) 27 (App. D.C. 1944), as quoted in Anon, ‘Recent developments in the Law of Patents under Thurman Arnold’, Columbia Law Review , 45 (May 1945), 422–43 at 434.

⁷³See Waller, (note 69, ‘The Short Unhappy Judgeship’), 245–6.

⁷⁵ These quotations from Arnold's judgement are taken from William Douglas Sellers, ‘The Flash of Genius Doctrine Approaches the Patent Office’, Journal of the Patent Office Society , 26 (April 1944), 275–80 at 277–8. In characterising industrial research in this way, Arnold made explicit use of Charles Kettering's testimony to the TNEC.

⁷⁶Irving Langmuir, ‘Faraday Medallist: response. Incentives for Science’, in Collected Works, vol. 12, 400–3 at 402. The Faraday Medal was awarded to Langmuir by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Great Britain but was presented to him at the meeting of the AIEE in St. Louis, Missouri on 26 June 1944.

⁷⁷Irving Langmuir, ‘Faraday Medallist: response. Incentives for Science’, in Collected Works, vol. 12, 400–3 at 402. The Faraday Medal was awarded to Langmuir by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Great Britain but was presented to him at the meeting of the AIEE in St. Louis, Missouri on 26 June 1944.

⁷⁸Irving Langmuir, ‘Faraday Medallist: response. Incentives for Science’, in Collected Works, vol. 12, 400–3 at 402. The Faraday Medal was awarded to Langmuir by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Great Britain but was presented to him at the meeting of the AIEE in St. Louis, Missouri on 26 June 1944.

⁷⁹Irving Langmuir, ‘Faraday Medallist: response. Incentives for Science’, in Collected Works, vol. 12, 400–3 at 402. The Faraday Medal was awarded to Langmuir by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Great Britain but was presented to him at the meeting of the AIEE in St. Louis, Missouri on 26 June 1944.. Many of the numerous legal critics of the judgement in Potts v. Coe made essentially the same point when they questioned Arnold's fixation on the patent system as concerned primarily to reward the individual. Their point was that the prime function of the system was to secure disclosure of valuable inventions wherever they might come from, and however they might be produced. See, for example, Anthony William Deller, ‘Test of Patentability for Inventions made in Corporate Research Laboratories’, Journal of the Patent Office Society, 27 (1945), 682–8, and Anon (note 74) who concludes that Arnold was trying to ‘handcuff all attempts by corporate groups to use the patent system as a means of gaining more extensive monopolies’ but that when one considers the inventions that have come out of corporate laboratories ‘there are few who would contend that such discoveries were better to be lost to society than to have granted their discoverers the limited monopoly they acquired’ (437).

⁸⁰ It is unsurprising that there was considerable ‘bite’ in Langmuir's comments on Arnold's judgement given that Arnold had been pursuing General Electric in the courts since 1939. He had indicted the Company on charges of anti-competitive activities in relation to fluorescent lighting and tungsten carbide. These suits were halted in 1943 thanks largely to the intervention of the U.S. Army and the exigencies of wartime production. For Arnold's privately expressed views on General Electric see Arnold to Miss C. Warriner, 28 April 1942 and Arnold to Matthew Josephson, 17 October 1945, in Voltaire and the Cowboy: The Letters of Thurman Arnold , edited by Gene M. Gressley (Boulder, CO, 1977), 326–8, 366–7. For the broader context of antitrust measures see David C. Mowery, ‘The U.S. National Innovation System: Origins and Prospects for Change’, Research Policy , 21 (1992), 125–44; Wyatt Wells, Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World (New York, 2002); David M. Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953 (Princeton, NJ, 1998), Chapter 4.

⁸¹William Kingston, ‘Streptomycin, Schatz v. Waksman, and the Balance of Credit for Discovery’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 59 (2004), 441–62 at 456. An excellent guide to many of the ins and outs of Section 103, as well as to the ‘flash of genius’ doctrine and subsequent commentary on both, is John F. Witherspoon (ed.), Nonobviousness – The Ultimate Condition of Patentability (Washington, DC: The Bureau of National Affairs Inc., 1980).

⁸²Hart (note 80) develops the theme that the post war consensus was a confluence of many tributaries, not the single-handed creation of Vannevar Bush.

⁸⁴ ‘G.E. does it. It has shouldered a unique martial burden without altering its stride’, Fortune , 23 (March 1942), 65–9, 156, 159–62, 165, at 65–66.

⁸³Rosenfeld (note 11), 275.

⁸⁵ Irving Langmuir, ‘Science and Incentives in Russia’, Scientific Monthly , 63 (August 1946), reproduced in Langmuir, Collected Works , vol 12, 391–9 at 396. For long, interesting letters written by Langmuir's brother Dean about the Russia trip see Rosenfeld, (note 11), 282–92.

⁸⁸Irving Langmuir, ‘Planning for Progress: Two Alternatives’, Columbia University Engineering Center News, 1 (2) December 1951, reprinted in Langmuir, Collected Works, vol. 12, 404–8, at, 406. Langmuir returned repeatedly to these themes in his later years. See also, for example, his paper ‘Freedom: The Opportunity to Profit from the Unexpected’, Research Laboratory Bulletin (Fall 1956), reproduced in Langmuir, Collected Works, vol. 12, 411–6.

⁸⁶Irving Langmuir, ‘Planning for Progress: Two Alternatives’, Columbia University Engineering Center News, 1 (2) December 1951, reprinted in Langmuir, Collected Works, vol. 12, 404–8, at 405.

⁸⁷Irving Langmuir, ‘Planning for Progress: Two Alternatives’, Columbia University Engineering Center News, 1 (2) December 1951, reprinted in Langmuir, Collected Works, vol. 12, 404–8, at, 406.

⁸⁹Irving Langmuir, ‘The Growth of Particles in Smokes and Clouds and the Production of Snow from Supercooled Clouds’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 92 (1948), 167–85 at 167. Langmuir credits Whitney with the introduction of the term ‘serendipity’ into the GE laboratory ‘several years ago’.

⁹⁰Vincent Schaefer's unpublished autobiography is titled ‘Serendipity in Science: Twenty years at Langmuir University’, Vincent J. Schaefer Papers, University Archives, University Libraries, State University of New York at Albany; Duncan C. Blanchard, ‘Serendipity, Scientific Discovery, and Project Cirrus’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 77 (1996), 1279–86.

⁹¹Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science (Princeton, NJ, 2004). See also Steven Shapin's review: ‘The Accidental Scientist’, American Scientist, 92 (July–August 2004), 374–6. There is a significant philosophical literature on serendipity. A useful entry point is Aharon Kantorovich, Scientific Discovery: Logic and Tinkering (Albany, NY, 1993), esp. 148–71.

⁹²Speaking of the situation in 1940, C. Guy Suits, who became Assistant Director of the GE Laboratory that year, recalled: ‘Albert Hull was the Assistant Director, Irving Langmuir was an Associate Director, and Saul Dushman was an Assistant Director. Now none of those three people did any assistant directing. These were honorary titles. They were not interested and were terribly bored to be concerned with it. I had the same title, but in my case I was intended to do some assistant directing’. [Chauncey Guy Suits, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1984 by A. Michal McMahon, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, transcript available online at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Guy_Suits].

⁹³In retrospect, of course, it seems to us that the provisions of the 1952 Patent Act, in stipulating that the method of making an invention was irrelevant to its patentability, removed any legal need to argue for such eligibility. But this situation probably did not look so secure in the 1950s.

⁹⁴Powerful as it might seem, ‘serendipity’ was and is a subtle concept. Merton and Barber point out that the idea had to be presented very carefully to shareholders (and we must suppose to management too) since innovation ‘by accident’ was not calculated to endear the corporate research enterprise to them. Other companies, such as Standard Oil, put a different spin on the term, describing it, as Merton and Barber put it ‘as frosting on the cake of competent and reliable research activities’. [Merton and Barber, (note 91), 211].

⁹⁵David A. Hollinger, ‘Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States’, New Literary History, 21 (1990), 897–919.

⁹⁶William H. Whyte Jr, The Organization Man (New York, 1956). I have used the English edition, (London, 1957), 205. See Shapin, (note 9), 120–6.

⁹⁷Whyte (note 96), 209.

⁹⁸This was not true of every corporation of course. As noted, in the pharmaceutical industry much research was self-described as empirical hunt and try. Kingston suggests that it was the influence of this rising corporate constituency that forced the crucial modification to Section 103 in the reformed Patent Act of 1952 [Kingston (note 81), 456].