Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

16 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE GENERAL WELFARE
The Nation had been born in an age of scientific exploration and
experiment, its very founding a consequence in part of the industrial revolu-
tion in England. Among the framers of the Constitution, men of science
like Franklin, Madison, Pinckney, and Jefferson looked to the early estab-
lishment in the new Nation of a national university and Federal societies
of the arts and sciences, for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, trades,
and manufactures. But because the new States feared centralization of
power of any kind in the Federal Government, these institutions were not
spelled out.
The powers granted Congress by the Constitution "to promote the
progress of science and useful arts" by issuing patents to authors and in-
ventors, by conducting a periodic census, and supervising coinage, weights,
and measures, were exercised in spirit if not to the letter. In any case, their
scientific implications were ignored. Small autonomous laboratories ap-
peared before long in a number of the executive departments of the Govern-
ment, providing certain functional services involving research, but
encouragement and support of fundamental science were left to such privately
organized agencies as the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia,
1743), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, 1780), and in
Washington, the Smithsonian Institution (1846), and the American Associ-
ation for the Advancement of Science (1848). In no way an adjunct of the
Government but merely an advisory body in scientific matters was the
National Academy of Sciences, incorporated by an act of Congress on
March 3, 1863. Without authority or independent funds, it was only required,
"whenever called upon by any department of the Government * * * to in-
vestigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or
art" submitted to it, the investigations to be paid from regular congressional
appropriations made for that purpose.
Congress repeatedly demonstrated great reluctance to provide even
small sums of money for the support of any private scientific or inventive
enterprise, however beneficial to the Nation. Robert Fulton's pleas for
Federal aid in the 1830's went unanswered. Governments abroad were
more helpful with his submarine, and on his return private funds made his
steamboat "folly" possible. Only after 6 years of petitions was Congress
persuaded to grant Samuel F. B. Morse the sum of $30,000 to set up his
experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington in 1843.
The scant concern of the Federal Government with science is evident
in the delayed organization of some of its most essential scientific agencies.
Military and civil exploration were provinces of the Army Corps of Engineers
until the Geological Survey was established in the Department of the Interior
in 1879. The Treasury's Coast and Geodetic Survey, founded in 1807 to