Title: A New Role for Professional Scientists in Industry: Industrial Research at General Electric, 1900-1916
Abstract: Only an attentive stockholder would have noticed the item. It was buried near the bottom of the Report of the Third Vice President of the General Electric Company, in that firm's 1902 Annual Report. After describing the important details of manufacturing and engineering for the year 1901, Vice President Edwin W. Rice noted: Although our engineers have always been liberally supplied with every facility for the development of new and original designs and improvements of existing standards, it has been deemed wise during the past year to establish a laboratory to be devoted exclusively to original research. It is hoped by this means that many profitable fields may be discovered.1 With this, a major American corporation announced to the world that it had embarked on an experiment in the support of scientific research. This marked the formal unveiling of a program that had actually begun on December 15, 1900, when Willis R. Whitney, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had arrived in Schenectady, New York, to begin devoting two days a week to research at GE's largest manufacturing works.2 He was not the first professional scientist to be employed in American industry-or even in General Electric. Nor was his laboratory the
Publication Year: 1980
Publication Date: 1980-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 28
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot