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34 VVVVVVVVVVV In 160, eight students at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business published an analysis of the technical and economic feasibility of fuel cells. The preface to their 160-page study featured selections from the 1875 edition of the Congressional Record heralding the era of the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine. This technology, the Record declared, would begin a “new era in the history of civilization,” one potentially more revolutionary than the “invention of the wheel, the use of metals, or the steam engine.” But developing and adopting the new technology would present major cost and technical challenges and introduce considerable socioeconomic dislocation. Gasoline was a dangerous and dirty fuel. Vehicles powered by it could attain high speeds, threatening hapless pedestrians, fouling the air, and displacing horse power on farms, threatening American agriculture as a way of life. But the gasoline engine was a technology that was also “full of promise for the future of man and the peace of the world.”1 The parallel was unmistakable. Eighty-five years after gasoline engines first challenged and then irrevocably altered the established socio-technical order, suggested the authors, a new energy conversion technology was poised to upset the status quo in transportation. Then, as now, developing and marketing innovations brought risks and rewards. Yet the lessons of history, indicated the authors, were clear. In its day, this monograph was often cited by fuel cell aficionados. But the historical analogy the Harvard students attempted to draw was not quite precise . The initial path to gasoline automobility had been paved by entrepreneurs with little direct help from the state, notwithstanding the impetus given by government procurement during the First World War.2 The origins of expectations for a commercial fuel cell, in contrast, can be traced to groups in or linked to the 2 Military Miracle Battery During the past year a remarkable increase in fuel-cell activities occurred. . . . This upswing in interest is based on the potentials of fuel-cell systems that will operate on fuels and air. —U.S. Army/ARPA joint report, February 6, 1961 MILITARY MIRACLE BATTERY 35 U.S. defense establishment. The military’s interest in fuel cells began in the mid-150s and persisted through changes in war-fighting doctrine over the ensuing decades, driving the early stages of the first fuel cell boom. The technology first appeared attractive to defense planners as a solution to the special problems arising from the confluence of the nuclear arms and space races and the revolution in transistorized electronics. Of the armed services, the Army was the most interested. Its doctrine of the “tactical atom” held that, on the nuclear battlefield, the traditional order of battle—the multidivision Army group—was obsolete. In such an environment, only small, dispersed, and highly mobile units equipped with the latest communications and surveillance gear could hope to survive. But the miniaturization trend in electronics was not being matched in power sources. Considering existing batteries inadequate and incremental improvements merely an interim solution, the Army sought to develop breakthrough power sources.3 Planners in the Advanced Research Projects Agency would become intimately involved with this effort. Since around the turn of the millennium, if not before, ARPA (or DARPA, for Defense, as it was known from 172 to 13 and again from 16) has acquired a sterling reputation among media, policymakers , and some social scientists as a model federal manager of lean and effective cost-shared research and development. The agency’s success in certain fields gave rise to the idea of a D/ARPA “system” or mode of general-purpose technology innovation and transfer.4 Indeed, its very name has taken on almost talismanic significance. In 200, the Department of Energy created ARPA-E (Energy), a division emulating the D/ARPA approach of using relatively small amounts of money to attract the best and brightest minds in researching high-risk, transformational technological concepts that industry was unable or unwilling to pursue. In this way, the federal government hoped to bridge the gaps between the invention and innovation of energy and power source technologies.5 To be sure, D/ARPA’s reputation stems largely from its role in advancing materials research and especially computer science and technology. But in its early days, the agency engaged with the Army and industry in a now-forgotten program of research in power sources, work that revealed how vastly more difficult it was to succeed in this field than in other...

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