• Early American colleges prepared students to be ministers or lawyers by teaching Latin and Greek--all students took the same courses, no majors
• The U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Rensselaer Polytechnic were early experiments in technical education
• a few existing colleges began to found schools of science or civil engineering in the 1840s and 1850s, offering an alternative scientific or engineering course as well as the classical course
• most engineering schools were founded in the 1870s and 1880s.  Other colleges began to offer a choice of majors in that period
• The Morrill Act in 1862 supported the creation of a college in each state to teach "agriculture and the mechanic arts."  However many land grant colleges got off to a slow start as they tried to figure out how to teach fields that didn't yet have much specialized scientific knowledge
• in 1876 Johns Hopkins University became the first American college to offer an earned Ph.D. degree.  The Ph.D. was supposed to teach you how to do research, to discover new knowledge, instead of just learning existing knowledge.  Many major colleges transformed themselves into universities in the 1880s and 1890s.
• out of all these developments in education applied science boomed--people with Ph.D.s were looking for new kinds of jobs

Meanwhile the new big companies began to see that they needed to continually develop new products

• it was more profitable to compete on the basis of having a new, improved product than to compete on price
• in the late 19th century companies generally bought patents from inventors, but this could get expensive because competing companies could get into bidding wars for the essential next breakthrough (for example, this happened with new kinds of light bulbs)
• some companies already employed scientists (particularly chemists) to test raw materials and trouble-shoot production problems

• a company might fund a research laboratory at a college
• or it might create its own research laboratory
• In 1900 General Electric founded the first industrial research laboratory whose only task was to develop new products, with as its first director.  It was not very successful at first, but a brilliant physical chemist named Irving Langmuir finally showed the potential with his invention of the gas-filled lightbulb in 1916.  Langmuir won the Nobel Prize for his research at GE on chemical reactions at low pressure.

• it turned out the most creative scientists wanted to publish their research and make their name as scientists--industry had to accomodate them
• other big companies founded industrial research labs, and after WWI industrial research took off as companies like DuPont sought to find new uses for their wartime factories

• because of a lack of large companies and the national importance of farming, agricultural extension stations at the land grant colleges and the federal government took responsibility for agricultural research
• the federal Department of Agriculture was created in 1862 to do scientific research
• it took a while to figure out how to balance between basic scientific research and responding to immediate crises.  First major discovery came in 1893--that Texas Cattle Fever was caused by a tick and could be transmitted from one generation of tick to the next (scientists had thought this absurd)
• in many states land grant colleges got early into agricultural research, though sometimes that was only testing fertilizer.  State legislatures had trouble understanding the need for basic research, but developments like the Babcock Butterfat test and the discovery of vitamins gradually convinced them of the value of research
• in 1887 the Hatch Act provided federal funding for agricultural research stations in each state
• in 1914 the Smith-Lever act provided federal funding for agricultural extension programs

1898 Dairy Barn Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison