Abstract
As we have seen, the opportunity to create the National Research Council was provided by the war. Nevertheless, even before the armistice, there were some who believed that its primary focus ought to be shifted from military activities to those of industry. Hale wanted the new agency to become a permanent organisation for promoting and coordinating scientific work, in collaboration with industrial complexes and their needs. In 1919, he wrote: ‘The Academy organized the National Research Council … with a view to stimulating the growth of science and its application to industry, and particularly with a view to the co-ordinating of research agencies for the sake of enabling the United States, in spite of its democratic and individualistic organization, to bend its energies effectively toward a common purpose’.
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Notes
- 1.
From a memorandum entitled “Confidential: The Origin and Purpose of the National Research Council”, dated 21 May 1919 (box 41, Millikan Papers). See Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, 1919–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 52.
- 2.
Helen Wright, Explorer of the Universe. A Biography of George Ellery Hale (College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics, 1994), p. 303.
- 3.
For this episode, see Giovanni Battimelli, ‘Senza alcun vincolo ufficiale: Tullio Levi-Civita e i congressi internazionali di meccanica applicata’, Rivista di Storia della Scienza, II Ser., 4 (1996): pp. 51–80.
- 4.
Senator, shareholder and administrative advisor for numerous companies and industrial groups (including Montecatini and Edison), Ettore Conti was one of the most authoritative figures of the industrial bourgeoisie in Lombardy, and was behind some of the most important operation of conversion following the first world war. Conti actually did leave the Office of Inventions and Research out of the first dismantling operations, as he promised Volterra. However, the difficulties encountered during the creation phase of the National Research Council later forced him to go forward with dismantling the Office as well.
- 5.
See Ettore Conti, Dal taccuino di un borghese (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986).
- 6.
For the information that follows, see the exhibition catalogue 1925–1975. La Treccani compie 70 anni. Mostra storico-documentaria (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1993).
- 7.
In the meantime, Giovanni Gentile had become Minister of Education.
- 8.
Formiggini’s accusations are contained in his anti-Gentile pamphlet entitled ‘La Ficozza filosofica del Fascismo e la Marcia sulla Leonardo. Libro edificante e sollazzevole’, which has become almost impossible to find today; the pamphlet’s title refers to the lampoon that gave Gentile the nicknamed ‘Fra Ficozza’, from the word in Roman dialect that means ‘a bump on the head’.
- 9.
The Minister of Education was Benedetto Croce, who was also a member of the Lincei but was opposed to the direction taken by the academy in that period, and moreover, was engaged in a dispute with Volterra.
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Guerraggio, A., Paoloni, G. (2012). From War to Peace: Italy’s National Research Council. In: Vito Volterra. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27263-9_6
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