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  • Establishing Research Corporation: A Case Study of Patents, Philanthropy, and Organized Research in Early Twentieth-Century America
  • Thomas C. Lassman (bio)
Establishing Research Corporation: A Case Study of Patents, Philanthropy, and Organized Research in Early Twentieth-Century America. By Thomas D. Cornell. Tucson, Ariz.: Research Corporation, 2004. Pp. 328. Available through university libraries in North America.

Historians have examined in much detail the origins and growth of the scientific research establishment in the United States. This institutional transformation was wrought by the rise of big business during the late nineteenth century, the specialization of knowledge into new professional disciplines, and the rapid expansion of the university system under the auspices [End Page 227] of corporate philanthropy. Universities drew on the fortunes amassed by industrialists to extend the frontiers of science, while corporate America put that advanced knowledge to work in its own laboratories to create new opportunities for economic growth. In this book, Thomas Cornell explores the institutional workings of this "research revolution" at the beginning of the twentieth century through the career of scientist-entrepreneur Frederick G. Cottrell.

Guided by Progressive-era ideals, Cottrell had an abiding devotion to public service and voluntary cooperation between academia and industry. Born in 1877, he completed his undergraduate work at the University of California and received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Leipzig in 1902. Soon thereafter, while consulting for DuPont, he developed and introduced the modern electrostatic precipitator—an ingenious device that reduced smokestack emissions. Early successes at DuPont and elsewhere prompted Cottrell to patent and commercialize the new apparatus. But rather than profiting personally, Cornell writes, "Cottrell decided to donate his patents to an organization that would oversee their commercial development and use the profits to support a program of research grants. That aim set him apart from other inventors and made him an organizational as well as a technological pioneer" (p. 12). Founded in 1912, Cottrell's Research Corporation (RC) combined both business interests and contemporary philanthropic attitudes. It distributed all profits from the sale of electrostatic precipitators to individuals and institutions, especially universities, for socially relevant scientific research. RC also advised academic researchers and independent entrepreneurs on transforming their inventions into marketable products.

Making excellent use of published and archival sources, Cornell explores the technical history of the electrostatic precipitator, the corporate structure set up by Cottrell to make it a commercial success, and the network of engineers, scientists, and administrators that carried out RC's public-service mandate. Driving Cornell's analysis is the recurring tension between the profit motive—the business side of RC—and Cottrell's core philanthropic mission. In some cases, the technical and managerial requirements of designing, manufacturing, and selling electrostatic precipitators interfered with efforts to evaluate other inventions for commercial development. Cornell attributes this outcome to conflicting attitudes, obligations, and time constraints among RC's senior executives. Among the aborted efforts was an attempt to develop and commercialize a concrete replacement for wooden railroad ties, a process for treating zinc and lead ores, a treatment for tuberculosis, and a technique for processing beef. "[T]he procedures that Research Corporation adopted to evaluate these (and other) inventions," Cornell concludes, "illustrate the larger shift from inventing as an individual activity to inventing as an organized activity" (p. 120).

In his last chapter, Cornell addresses some of the broader historiographic [End Page 228] mplications of RC's early history, reevaluating David Noble's interpretation of university–industry relations at the beginning of the twentieth century. The history of the founding and early growth of RC, Cornell argues, complicates Noble's assertion that academic research in the sciences was co-opted by the business community for the sole purpose of generating higher profits. Although its commercial success was of primary importance, Cottrell's venture substituted altruism for the profit motive, forfeiting profits in favor of helping academic scientists commercialize their research. Cornell also connects these alternative institutional responses to the simultaneous growth of research universities and science-based industries to the larger organizational imperatives of the Progressive era.

Because Cornell so effectively reconstructs the details of RC's early history, he left me wanting to know much more about its...

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