“Channels of Influence on Interwar Physics”

Shaul Katzir (Tel Aviv University)

Building on examples discussed in the “interactions of interwar physics” workshop at the CEU, the other papers in this session, and a few published studies and on my own research on piezoelectricity, this talk attempts at a survey of the manners by which physicists directed their research to topics of interest for users and developers of technologies, and the channels by which societal groups directed scientists to study topics pertinent to their interests. Discussing a few cases were scientists studied questions relevant for practical design in fields likes aerodynamics, acoustics and the study of electrons, I will show that their study fitted not only the utilitarian but also the disciplinary logic and that this overlap was crucial for their study. Yet, the choice of subjects relevant from utilitarian logic, rather than non-relevant ones followed particular channels of influence. Some of them were quite subtle, like the general, but new, notion that scientific research could and should support study of technology, which facilitated scientists’ choice of topics relevant to technology. Institutes for fostering research applicable to technologies, many of them novel, left clearer traces. Industrial, state and public laboratories had clear interests in developing particular technologies (e.g. telecommunication, aviation, high-voltage) and directed research to pertinent topics. Through material assistance, and by providing a considerable body of knowledge for further scientific research, the forces beyond these interests shaped also academic research.

“Industrializing Electrons: Free Electrons, Undirected Research and the Cosmic Origin of Electronics in Germany”

Falk Müller (Goethe Universität)

Many physicists working in industrial laboratories felt patronized by their academic colleagues. In light of the privileges granted to industrial researchers in terms of equipment and payment these feelings were partly due to a phantom pain caused by a romanticized image of academic research. Nonetheless, researcher tried to create opportunities for free or undirected research in industrial laboratories as well. In this paper, I want to discuss the relation of concepts of independent research with the choice of research projects. I will focus on ways of presenting and utilizing electrons at the Research Institute of the German electro technical company AEG in the interwar period. In this period (stretching into the early war period), researchers attempted to develop electron optics into a new branch of physics that allowed for the development of technical appliances and at the same time gave researchers the feeling to contribute considerably to the development of physics as well.

“Mathematics and the Wireless World”

Scott Walter (Université de Nantes)

One of the most remarkable technological developments of the 1920s was that of the vacuum tube. The crucial properties of the vacuum tube, as Balthasar Van der Pol pointed out with respect to the triode oscillator in 1920, stem from retention of nonlinear terms in the differential equation describing the circuit containing the triode. Solving the resulting equation, however, was a great challenge. My paper compares the techniques employed by Van der Pol, Alfred Liénard, and others to capture the behavior of vacuum tubes and other nonlinear oscillating systems in the 1920s.

Out of the Labyrinth of Recipe Commerce”: Dielectric Breakdown, Tacit Knowledge, and the Disenchantment of Applied Science”

Karl Hall (Central European University)

The manufacture of insulating materials was crucial to the expansion of electrification in the 1920s, when ambitious researchers hoped to develop a science of high-voltage insulators, briefly signaling the “dawn of industrio-physics.” Their hopes turned out to be premature. No immediate predecessor to materials science emerged in this border area where physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering overlapped, and these nominal failures subsequently vanished from narratives of modern physics, though some of the protagonists were well versed in atomic theory. But this was more than a matter of brute empirical intractability in the early days of the quantum theory of solids. This episode, properly situated in the industrial research laboratory, can tell us much about the shifting meaning of “applied science” between the wars—and what patent lawyers have to teach historians about the “artisan, handwork character of science.”