ROD MILLARD
In his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada on the eve of the millennium in 1899, T.C. Keefer, civil engineer and transportation philosopher, predicted that Canada would have a magnificent second industrial revolution based on abundant, cheap hydroelectricity.1 Keefer did not live to see his electrical utopia.2 He died in January 1915, about a year after Henry Ford improved mass production with the moving assembly line. Just as Ford had revolutionized production, science applied to modern warfare in the form of the machine gun, high explosives, and poison gas, showed, as Carroll Pursell notes, ‘that death, too, could be mass-produced.’3 A century of belief in the constructive power of science was shaken; a devastating critique would follow the war. Canadian scientists and engineers, however, did not lose their faith in science. No less horrified than other Canadians by the macabre spectacle of death and destruction on the Western Front, they knew they had an important role to play in winning the war, while still hoping some day to create the kind of world Keefer only dreamed of. The war gave them an unprecedented opportunity to promote science and, more important, to promote themselves.
From the outset of the war, serious scientific and technological problems were encountered.4 In September 1914, for example, Canadian manufacturers could not produce a complete round of artillery ammunition because they lacked sophisticated machine tools and proper gauges. Also, while Canada produced concentrates of zinc and copper matte – metals essential for making the brass parts of shells – refining was done in the United States, not Canada. As a result, machinery, gauges, refined zinc and copper, including fabricated copper shell bands and, for a time, shell fuses, had to be purchased by Canadians directly from the United States.5 Manufacturers also complained that they were unable to produce many articles essential to various trade processes because of German monopolies.6 Scientists ruefully observed that for the past forty years, Germany had systematically established many state-supported, science-based industries – some once dominated by Britain – through the clever use of synthetics. With German efficiency and aggressive business tactics, these industries became monopolies, leaving Britain and its allies dependent on various German chemical, electrical, and glassware commodities. Distinguished British scientists credited German industrial success to the organization of its scientific resources, particularly the application of science to industry.7 In Canada, Professor A.B. Macallum, a University of Toronto biochemist and eminent researcher, attributed the neglect of science to a long tradition of amateurism and laissez-faire individualism in science.8 Had Britain developed its industries scientifically, he argued, Germany would not have become strong enough to wage war.9
In spite of Macallum’s misgivings, some important scientific and technological developments took place in wartime Canada. Although Canadian troops were victims of the first gas attack at Ypres in 1915, no chemical warfare research was conducted in Canada until 1937.10 Researchers focused instead on projects such as the production of acetone and helium, achieving some significant innovations at home and abroad.11 In 1915 British authorities realized that their strategic supplies of acetone, a solvent used to make cordite, the standard British military propellant, were inadequate for an expanded war effort. Anxious to secure a reliable supply, and because Canada had the only carbide and acetylene plant in the British Empire, the Imperial Munitions Board (IMB), the British government’s purchasing agent in Canada, asked Shawinigan Water and Power, Quebec, to manufacture acetone from acetylene, using German patents commercially unexploited before the war. Towards the end of 1915 a team of chemists – T.H. Matheson, H.S. Reid, A.F.G. Cadenhead, W.C. Harvey, and F.H. Andrews – began experiments at Shawinigan Falls. Solving many difficult chemical and mechanical problems, they synthesized acetone from acetylene in commercial quantities. By January 1917 the first shipment of acetone was sent to Britain. The whole process, from experiment to shipment, took just over a year.12 The company also produced the first commercial quantities of metallic magnesium in North America, whereas Germany previously had been the world’s sole supplier.13 Earlier, in the spring of 1916 the IMB had set up its second national factory, British Acetones, Toronto Ltd, to produce acetone from corn by a fermentation process at the Gooderham and Worts distillery in Toronto. This method was discovered by Chaim Weizmann during an experiment at the Royal Naval Cordite Factory in Poole, England. British Acetones developed the technology to bring Weizmann’s discovery into commercial production. The Toronto plant became the largest supplier of acetone in the British Empire.14
Helium, like acetone, was scarce and expensive. Sir Richard Threlfall and Sir Ernest Rutherford suggested that helium could be substituted for hydrogen, then commonly used in balloons and dirigible airships, if an adequate supply could be secured. Unlike hydrogen, helium was less dangerous to use because it was non-flammable. In December 1915 the British asked J.C. (later Sir John) McLennan, head of physics, University of Toronto, to conduct a survey of the empire’s helium resources. Following experiments in 1917 in Hamilton, McLennan and a team of Canadian scientists and engineers recovered large quantities of inexpensive helium from natural gas at a plant in Calgary. Although this supply of helium was developed too late for the war effort, the knowledge gained from its production enabled McLennan and his colleagues at the University of Toronto to conduct pioneering research in low temperatures after the war.15
Aircraft, like acetone and helium, were not produced in quantity in Canada until the war. While the technology used to build them was imported, significant innovation did take place in Canada. In June 1915, for example, Canada’s first aircraft factory, Curtiss Aeroplanes and Motors Ltd of Canada, located in Toronto, began to produce the Curtiss Canada, or Model C. The original plan was to duplicate the American-designed America, a large twin-engine flying boat intended for transatlantic flight. Such profound changes occurred during production, however, that a new plane, different in design and appearance soon emerged – the Curtiss Canada. A similar, but less dramatic change happened with the JN4, a single-engine, two-seat biplane used for military flight training. Built by Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd, Toronto, an IMB factory that had absorbed much of the Curtiss plant, the JN4 was the first mass-produced aircraft in Canada. Some 2,918 were built during the war. Like the Curtiss Canada, the JN4 was modified during production and was known as the Canadian JN4; pilots and mechanics called it simply the ‘Canuck.’16
The most extraordinary technical achievement in wartime Canada was the rebuilding of the Quebec Bridge in 1917. The first attempt to span the St Lawrence River near Quebec City ended tragically on 29 August 1907, when the bridge, nearing completion by the Phoenix Bridge Company of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, collapsed, killing seventy-four men. It was one of the world’s most spectacular engineering disasters. After a royal commission investigation blamed the disaster on faulty design and inadequate on-site engineering supervision, the St Lawrence Bridge Company, a Canadian business headed by Phelps Johnson was awarded the contract to rebuild the bridge. Using Johnson’s new K-truss bracing system, the bridge was finished in 1917, but not without another accident, which resulted in the death of eleven men. Opened officially on 22 August 1919 by the Prince of Wales, the Quebec Bridge attracted worldwide attention as the world’s longest cantilever bridge.17
Overseas, McLennan and other Canadians made important scientific contributions to the war effort. McLennan served as a scientific adviser to the Admiralty. He assembled a team of his former assistants and students (some drawn from active duty) to work on what McLennan believed was the most difficult problem assigned to scientists – the detection and destruction of enemy submarines.18 A.S. Eve, a McGill physicist, served as scientific director at the Admiralty Experimental Station in Harwich, and his colleague, Louis V. King, also worked on anti-submarine devises, developing a continuous tuneable diaphragm for sending and receiving underwater sound.19 In 1916 Robert W. Boyle, head of physics at the University of Alberta, was placed in charge of a group working on submarine detection by echo methods, which used high-frequency sound waves and was later known as ASDIC. Another Canadian, Reginald Fessenden, inventor of radio, while working in Boston developed the Fessenden Oscillator, an apparatus used for underwater telegraphy and echo sound ranging to determine the distance of submerged objects, such as icebergs, or submarines.20 On the Western Front, another McGill physicist, J.A. Gray, was in charge of locating enemy artillery by sound-ranging. He developed the technique for making important corrections for wind velocity.21
Notwithstanding these achievements, Canadian scientists and engineers were painfully aware that relatively little scientific research was conducted in Canada. The Connaught Laboratories, established in 1917 in Toronto, produced vaccines and sera, but basic scientific medical research, concentrated mainly at the University of Toronto and McGill University, lacked facilities and funding. Little industrial research was conducted. Reporting on a survey of industrial research facilities in May 1918, A.B. Macallum declared that provision for pure or applied scientific research in Canadian industry was ‘utterly inadequate.’22 Only thirty-seven industrial firms, with a total staff of 161, reported having research facilities; their total annual research expenditure was $135,000.23 Macallum later estimated that the country had only fifty pure researchers.24 Making matters worse, enlistments for military service had seriously depleted the scientific staff of government, industry, and university research establishments.25 ‘[R]esearch in Canada,’ economist Adam Shortt reported to Prime Minister Borden, ‘has been largely suspended except in a few of the leading industrial establishments.’26
Most private organizations were not capable of conducting industrial research. The Royal Society of Canada, the country’s premier scientific society, founded in 1882, was a learned society dedicated to literary and philosophical as well as scientific pursuits. In 1914 it did not possess a permanent headquarters in Ottawa, much less an industrial research laboratory or laboratories of any kind.27 Although the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers, Canada’s pre-eminent national professional engineering society, had conducted research on engineering standards and specifications,28 the society was primarily a professional body organized officially to raise the standard of engineering practice by the exchange of professional knowledge. Other engineering societies, such as the Canadian Mining Institute, served professional and business interests.29 An exception was the Royal Canadian Institute, Canada’s oldest surviving scientific society founded in 1849.30 In 1914 the institute organized the Bureau of Scientific and Industrial Research and School of Specific Industries, as a private research agency to apply science to industry by means of ‘industrial fellowships’ modelled after the highly successful system created by a University of Toronto graduate, Dr Robert Kennedy Duncan, at the University of Kansas and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research.31 Lacking its own laboratories, the bureau was designed to act as an intermediary between manufacturers needing research, and universities – specifically the University of Toronto – providing laboratories and researchers.32 Unfortunately, the University of Toronto was not yet ready to engage in the pure research that would allow the bureau to function.
By 1914 the University of Toronto was attempting to meet the practical needs of a rapidly expanding industrial economy through scientific research. In 1897 it offered the research degree of Doctor of Philosophy and the degree of Master of Applied Science in 1913. The creation of the School of Engineering Research within the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering in 1917 represented the university’s main contribution to industrial research. In spite of these initiatives, the university was not fully committed to institutionalizing industrial research. The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering still believed that education was its principal function. This view was shared by the larger university community. Although useful in promoting the university’s science and graduate programs, industrial research would remain subordinate to its wider educational ideals.33 Government offered no better prospects for research.
Before the war, no government agency was specifically mandated to coordinate and promote industrial research. The Geological Survey of Canada, founded in 1842, surveyed mineral, forest, and water resources before it was absorbed into other government departments by 1890. The Dominion Experimental Farms (1886) improved farming methods, while the Biological Board (1912), which eventually became the Fisheries Research Board, operated several marine biological stations.34 The Commission of Conservation (1909) advised the government on the scientific management of the country’s natural resources. It represented the first attempt to use science and technology to solve problems created by rapid industrialization and urbanization.35 Commission head, Clifford Sifton, wanted to coordinate industrial research. By 1918, however, the tide of public opinion in Canada and elsewhere had turned against the conservation ethic to embrace notions of maximizing natural resource production through science for commercial ends. Sifton resigned in 1918, and the commission was abolished in May 1921.36 What was needed was some new government body to coordinate industrial research. British and American wartime initiatives provided an example of the kind of state-supported research many Canadian scientists, engineers, and industrialists wanted to see in Canada.
On 5 July 1915, amid complaints in Britain that science was not being fully mobilized for war, the Admiralty set up the Board of Invention and Research, an independent body of eminent civilian scientists, to evaluate new inventions submitted to the government. On 25 July an order-in-council created the Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to promote the application of science to industry; in the following year it became the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In France, the Ministry of Inventions was formed in November 1915 to promote scientific research for the Ministry of War and of the Marine.37 Before the United States entered the war, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was organized in March 1915 to improve American aircraft. In the same year, a Naval Consulting Board, chaired by the sixty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison, was established to assess new technology, and in an attempt to centralize research in the United States, the National Research Council was founded in June 1916.38
In Canada during 1915 and 1916 prominent scientists, engineers, and industrialists urged the dominion government to appoint a commission on industrial research. Engineering and scientific societies offered their help;39 prominent individuals, such as J.W. Flavelle, head of the IMB, strongly favoured the idea.40 Correspondence and meetings with Sir George Foster, minister of trade and commerce, however, produced no results until 20 January 1916, when the British minister of munitions issued a circular letter, which included certain Canadian universities, asking for help with scientific military research.41 Alarmed by the prospect of Canadian universities’ acting independently of the government, on 23 May 1916 Foster submitted a report to the Privy Council recommending the appointment of a committee of council consisting of the ministers of trade and commerce, interior, mines, inland revenue, labour, and agriculture, together with a nine-member advisory committee representing scientific and industrial interests. Foster argued that there was an urgent need to mobilize and coordinate existing scientific and industrial resources to eliminate waste and to promote efficiency.
On 6 June an order-in-council created a cabinet subcommittee on scientific and industrial research, chaired by Foster, with a provision for an advisory council.42 On 29 November 1916 another order-in-council appointed the members of the Honorary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, or, the National Research Council (NRC), as it was named officially in 1925. The members included some of the most distinguished engineers, scientists, businessmen, and university administrators in Canada: J.C. McLennan; R.F. Ruttan, professor of chemistry, McGill; Frank Adams, dean of applied science, McGill; R.A. Ross, consulting engineer, Montreal; A.S. Mackenzie, president, Dalhousie University; W.C. Murray, president, University of Saskatchewan; T. Bienvenu, vice-president and general manager, La Banque Provinciale du Canada; and R. Hobson, president, Steel Company of Canada. Later, S.F. Kirkpatrick, professor of metallurgy, Queen’s University, and Arthur Surveyer, consulting engineer, Montreal, joined the council. Bienvenu attended only one meeting; Hobson was too busy with wartime duties to attend. Civil engineer J.B. Challies, superintendent, Dominion Water Power Branch, Department of the Interior, Ottawa, was made secretary; A.B. Macallum was appointed administrative chairman; he was the Advisory Council’s only paid member. On 29 August 1917 Bill 83 established the Advisory Council by act of Parliament. Its creation represented the first attempt in Canada to organize scientific research on a national basis.
Few noticed the appointment of the Advisory Council. Foster confided to his diary that most members of cabinet were ‘utterly indifferent or antagonistic’;43 Borden did not take note of it when he wrote his memoirs after the war. Given the times, this was not unexpected. In its third year, the war was not going well: casualties mounted, enlistments sagged, and a conscription crisis loomed. French and English Canadians quarrelled over the war and the treatment of French-speaking schoolchildren outside Quebec. While Foster’s volunteer council of earnest professors may have lacked much public notice, they nevertheless were important because they were part of a larger trend in wartime Canada. By late 1916 the voluntary and private nature of Canada’s war mobilization gave way, under the stress of war, to coercion and the intervention of the state in nearly every aspect of public and private life. Between 1916 and 1918 various government control agencies, appointed under the government’s emergency powers, tended to centralize Canada’s wartime economy. As in other countries, these activities helped to undermine laissez-faire attitudes and prepared the way for the greatly expanded role of government in economic and social life.44 The Advisory Council was no exception. Its creation was not only a bureaucratic manifestation of a country with a conservative and statist political tradition, but also the inevitable outcome of wartime conditions.
Organized to study and coordinate industrial research, the Advisory Council had no clearly defined role and status, apart from advising a cabinet subcommittee. There was little significant military research to coordinate, and the council did not have laboratories to conduct industrial research. Conflict with other government departments and agencies was inevitable. Awarding student scholarships and research grants to professors helped to avoid friction; the studentships and fellowships were a simple, direct, and highly effective way the Advisory Council assisted universities to produce researchers while it supported individual research projects. Collective research was conducted by associate committees, three of which were permanent: chemistry, mining and metallurgy, and forestry.45 In the summer of 1918, in spite of the relentless opposition of Queen’s University, the Advisory Council decided to lobby for the building of a central research laboratory in Ottawa. The cabinet initially rejected the idea, but in April 1919 it appointed a Commons committee headed by Hume Cronyn to investigate the matter. A year later, when the committee recommended a central research laboratory, the House of Commons passed the necessary legislation, but the Senate returned the bill in 1921.46 Not until 1932, in the depth of the Great Depression, were laboratories opened in Ottawa. The NRC then flourished during and after the Second World War.
The NRC’s success, however, has created one of the central myths in the history of Canadian science and technology: there was no industrial research in Canada before the First World War, the war forced the government to establish the NRC in 1916, and the NRC then became the focus of industrial research. Writers, such as Mel Thistle and Wilfrid Eggleston, have perpetuated this myth. James Hull and Philip Enros, however, argue that the movement for industrial research in Canada dates from a meeting in Toronto in 1897 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and that the lobby for industrial research led by engineers, scientists, and businessmen was large and vigorous. The NRC myth, according to Hull and Enros, originated with the NRC’s indictment of the poor state of industrial research in Canada, particularly its 1917 survey of the industrial research facilities, which, they argue, underestimated the country’s research potential. As the principal promoter of industrial research, it was in the NRC’s interest to project a gloomy picture of the state of industrial research in Canada.47
The war may not have been the great catalyst to industrial research, but scientific and engineering leaders were clear about one point: the war had demonstrated the importance of science to Canada and had given scientists greater recognition and self-confidence. ‘One of the most remarkable and perhaps unexpected results of the great war,’ Frank D. Adams noted in 1917, ‘is that there has been in every country in the English-speaking world a sudden awakening to the importance of scientific research.’48 In his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1920, R.F. Ruttan stated that the world was ‘ringing with appreciation of what science had accomplished in the great struggle.’49 Intimidated by German science before the war, Canadian scientists no longer felt inferior; victory had given them new confidence. Liberal scientific methods – cooperation coupled with freedom of effort and the power of initiative – not ‘German drill-sergeant, dogmatic and cast iron methods,’50 helped British scientists to match and surpass German achievements. In two years Britain had accomplished in every branch of science what Germany had taken forty years to attain. Scientists were not blind to the horror of modern warfare created by science. They considered the new weapons of war as necessary evils to defend the empire. They were more positive about the power of science to serve humanity: science had entered a new era. A.S. Mackenzie, president of Dalhousie University, declared: ‘science has fallen upon the most momentous period of its history.’51 The time was right to promote science and to take advantage of public support.
At the same time, however, scientists were concerned about whether Canada had the means to fulfil its scientific destiny. Mackenzie characterized Canadian research facilities as a ‘disgrace,’ adding that Canada was a ‘parasite’ on the research facilities of friends and neighbours.52 Pure research had suffered during the war. Ruttan estimated that only two or three university laboratories and one or two government departments could conduct research.53 Lack of research facilities was not only disgraceful, but a potential threat to Canada. There was a widely held belief among engineers and scientists that economic competition with Germany after the war would be fierce, or, as Macallum put it, ‘merciless.’54 Germany’s defeat on the battlefield would not necessarily destroy its formidable science-based industries. Aided by government subsidies and cheap labour, Germany would aggressively apply science to industry to dominate once again whole industries and world markets. ‘The present war,’ the Contract Record and Engineering Review asserted, ‘is a mighty effort by Germany to gain not only a military, but also a commercial supremacy … Tomorrow the military struggle will end and then the real and permanent business of nations will begin – industrial war. No one doubts that our military enemies of today will be, in equal strength, our commercial enemies of tomorrow.’55 If Canada hoped to pay off its enormous war debt and be competitive after the war, it should take advantage of Germany’s wartime isolation, conserve its natural resources, and follow Germany’s example of applying science to industry, rather than rely on tariff and patent laws. Science, business, and government had to cooperate to promote science and industrial research. Canada had no alternative.56 Germany was not the only potential threat to Canada. Danger also loomed from the republic to the south. With its well-endowed private industrial research laboratories, the United States not only had established a Naval Consulting Board and its own National Research Council, but was acquiring commercially useful German technology by confiscating enemy patents and industrial assets in the United States.57
The key to national prosperity was research. This was the great lesson engineers and scientists had drawn from Germany and the war. German governments subsidized universities; science graduates applied science to industry to create wealth and power. Similarly, American universities, with their German-trained professors, provided American industry with scientific and technological ‘know-how’ through their science and engineering graduates. Macallum explained the relationship between education and industry: ‘when the universities of a nation become permeated with the research spirit, as in Germany and the United States, its industries become endowed with it also … If the British Empire is to organize its industries on the research basis, it must promote research first in its universities.’58 Unfortunately, Canadian universities lagged far behind German and American universities. Macallum observed, for example, that the ‘annual budget of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exceeded the total of the annual expenditures of all the Faculties of Applied Science in Canada.’59 Macallum was dismayed that no systematic attempt had been made to find and train Canadian researchers. There were not enough researchers in Canada before the war; more would be needed after. In the meantime, he hoped that the Advisory Council’s studentships and fellowships would address the problem and even revolutionize the universities by helping them to become research institutions.60 For J.C. Fields, funding universities was of national importance: ‘How can we tolerate the thought that in Germany provision is made for training men in advanced research which is not made in Canada; that positions exist for men so trained which do not exist in Canada! What excuse can we Canadians offer in extenuation of the fact that the leading universities of the United States have left our universities far behind in the matter of research? If the people of Canada realized the significance of the modern scientific movement, they would see to it that the necessary funds were forthcoming, and they would surely insist, as a matter of national pride, on our universities taking their place alongside the foremost in the world.’61 Given the poor state of Canadian graduate education, Fields’s anger is understandable. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, graduate training emerged on a small-scale, haphazard basis and was confined mainly to the University of Toronto and McGill University. These institutions had few graduate students and awarded fewer advanced degrees. Between 1906 and 1913, for example, the number of students enrolled in PhD science disciplines at McGill ranged from seven to fifteen. From 1906 to 1912 only four science doctorates were awarded; six between 1913 and 1920. During a typical year at the University of Toronto, 1910–11, only twenty-four PhD students were enrolled in science disciplines.62 The Advisory Council claimed that less than a dozen PhD degrees in pure science had been awarded in Canada by 1918.63
Founded originally as denominational colleges to train clergy, most of the older Canadian universities did not recognize the need for advanced degrees. Few university posts were available to graduates in a young country emerging from its rural-agrarian roots. Universities were chronically underfunded and understaffed. They possessed scant library and laboratory facilities and awarded few graduate scholarships. Aspiring graduate students went to Britain and, especially, to the United States. Prestigious eastern American graduate schools, a mere two-day train ride from Toronto, attracted eager Canadian graduate students because of their prominent faculty members, generous scholarships, and the increasingly coveted PhD degree.64 Although some Canadian professors helped their students to obtain American scholarships, others were concerned about the exodus of Canada’s best students. Establishing a Canadian graduate program that offered the PhD, like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, seemed to be an obvious solution. The leading advocate of this view was James Loudon, the University of Toronto’s first Canadian-born president (1892–1906). During an acrimonious debate in the late nineteenth century over the place of science in the university, this ambitious and aggressive president championed the cause of German-style research at Toronto, but failed to have the PhD degree introduced in 1883. Macallum (who was graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1888 with a PhD) and other Toronto alumni returned to Canada from the United States with American degrees to fill appointments at Toronto. Together with their mentor, Loudon, they lobbied for the establishment of the PhD, and in 1897 the university senate approved the degree. Loudon attributed this achievement mainly to Macallum’s efforts.65 Macallum later supervised Toronto’s first completed PhD thesis.66
A man with a vision and a mission, Macallum worked tirelessly to expand the PhD offerings at Toronto and to create a graduate school. In 1916 he declared that the University of Toronto was at a crossroads: it could remain a reputable provincial university, or it could become a national university recognized abroad for research. But unless Canadian universities offered facilities for graduate work, students would turn to the United States. It would be ‘disastrous’ for Canadian unity, Macallum warned, if younger Canadian universities, especially the western universities, recruited their faculty members either in part or wholly from among American university graduates. It was the patriotic duty of the older universities, particularly the University of Toronto, to develop graduate courses. In a few years, Macallum predicted, Toronto would become a national university, ‘Organized to mould and unify the intellectual life of Canada.’67 In the meantime, more scholarships and library facilities were needed.68
A.B. Macallum of the University of Toronto, n.d. (University of Toronto Archives, B1966-0005/003(01))
Apart from patriotic ideals, the research ethic, and the University of Toronto’s destiny, Macallum and other scientists were troubled by more practical problems – the lack of status and jobs. Emerging from a highly pragmatic frontier society more concerned with subduing the wilderness than conducting laboratory experiments, science, especially pure science, had never been highly regarded other than for its immediate practical value, such as discovering mineral wealth. Scientists complained that science was badly taught in schools and looked down upon by universities. Oxford and Cambridge, not the German-style American universities, were represented as the highest university ideal.69 McGill economics and political science professor Stephen Leacock satirized scientists and engineers in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914); Queen’s English Professor James Cappon referred to his colleagues in the physics building as ‘educated plumbers.’70
Scientists could live without respect, perhaps, but not without jobs. Before the war, few opportunities existed in Canadian universities for ambitious young scientists. Some found government work; more – especially chemists – obtained jobs in industry; most were forced to seek employment in the United States. In 1895, Loudon complained to George Ross, Ontario minister of education (1883–99), about the loss of forty Toronto graduates to posts in American colleges and universities. Three years later, he published a list of eighty graduates who had obtained American fellowships, scholarships, and teaching positions in American universities.71 The most vocal critic of Toronto’s ‘brain drain’ was J.C. McLennan, Macallum’s former student who had been awarded the University of Toronto’s first PhD degree in physics (1900). McLennan rarely missed an opportunity to scold Canadian businessmen for not recognizing how science could improve productivity. He warned that Canadian-trained scientists, forced to work in the United States, were, in effect, strengthening competitive foreign industries at Canada’s expense. Complaining in 1916 that he had lost thirteen or fourteen of his ablest students to the United States, McLennan believed that Canada should conserve its scientific talent by creating attractive career opportunities at home.72 Earlier, in 1914, the Royal Canadian Institute had attempted to do just that.
The loss of Canadian scientific talent to the United States aroused the institute’s nationalist indignation. As the University of Toronto had earlier established the PhD degree to help to stem the flow of students to American graduate schools, the institute hoped that its Bureau of Scientific and Industrial Research would help to curb the loss of Canadian scientists to American research laboratories by creating career opportunities for young scientists and engineers. ‘The Bureau,’ declared the Institute’s secretary-treasurer, F.M. Turner, an industrial chemist, in 1915, ‘exists solely to try to get Canadian industrialists to avail themselves to a larger extent than they have in the past of the chemical and engineering talent we are developing in our universities.’73 Although the Bureau conducted some minor research and disseminated useful technical information to various manufacturers, apart from an extraordinary offer from the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to administer five of its industrial fellowships at the bureau it could not obtain financial support after the appointment of the Advisory Council.74
Engineers were faced with status and employment problems similar to those of scientists. As salaried employees of large public and private corporations, engineers could neither control their professional lives nor protect themselves from competition, as doctors and lawyers could do. To this extent, they found themselves in relatively the same economic predicament as most other industrial wage and salary earners. They felt unrecognized and unrewarded. The war, however, changed everything. Taking to heart David Lloyd George’s 1915 remark that the war was a terrific contest between the engineers of the warring nations,75 Canadian engineers took up arms with patriotic zeal and soon earned distinction in rank and decoration.76 The war gave engineers an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate their usefulness, not only at the Front, building fortifications and providing logistical support, but also at home, producing munitions and maintaining essential services. It brought engineers to public attention, and, for the first time in the history of the profession, they received the recognition they thought they deserved. By 1918, however, the prospect of peace threatened to deprive engineers of the source of their prominence. Overcrowding in the profession intensified competition for scarce jobs; wartime inflation threatened to undermine them financially. Various earlier initiatives, such as promoting industrial research, designed to enhance their prestige by identifying their expertise with the public interest, had failed to raise their status. Rejecting unionization for social and philosophical reasons, they campaigned instead for restrictive provincial licensing laws to obtain the same ends as unionization. Posing as enlightened professionals protecting the public interest, they received substantial monopoly powers through licensing to restrict competition, without resorting to any professionally undignified restrictive trade practices such as strikes.77
Scientists, by contrast, were not disposed to political action. Few in number, they were scattered throughout a handful of universities, government departments, and private industries. Highly individualistic, they possessed little group consciousness of themselves as a distinct occupation, much less as a profession. (There was, for example, no separate category for scientists in the 1911 and 1921 censuses.) Scientists tended to identify instead with their employers, as professors, civil servants, or company employees. Unlike engineers, they had no national organization to represent them. Nevertheless, by controlling university degrees and appointments, academic scientists had, in some respects, more control over their working lives than engineers. What scientists needed were more jobs and research facilities. Macallum and the Advisory Council provided both.
Macallum always insisted that industrial research could be furthered only by research in pure science at well-equipped graduate schools.78 The training of researchers was a necessary precondition; the Advisory Council’s studentships and fellowships provided the means. Promoting graduate teaching allowed Macallum and his colleagues to appeal to the university’s traditional teaching role while advancing their own research agenda. Universities increasingly came to recognize the importance of research, and by the end of the war, they saw scientific research as a fundamental part of the university.79
For several decades, Macallum had mounted his own personal crusade for scientific research through the University of Toronto, the National Conference of Canadian Universities, the Royal Society of Canada, and, especially, the Advisory Council. A few days after his appointment to the Advisory Council, Macallum told the Empire Club in Toronto: ‘We must develop and all of us must crusade for research. I have been crusading in this country; I have been crusading in the University, and now I am going out into the larger field to crusade … I am going to be a sort of Peter the Hermit to get you all to join me in the crusade.’80 By the onset of the Great War, Macallum had emerged as the principal propagandist and lobbyist for scientific research in Canada. Envisioning a terrible industrial war after the conflict, Macallum and other scientists and engineers effectively extended the war effort into peacetime to make industrial research a national priority. They were the essential workers in the struggle for national survival: only scientists and engineers could apply science to industry. The Advisory Council was the institutional expression of the wartime anxiety over industrial efficiency. Created to foster industrial research, it also served the interests of scientists by promoting scientific research in the universities.
The National Research Council, according to Frank Underhill, was one of the two most important things to emerge from the Great War. Although Canadian scientific and technological accomplishments were relatively modest, the first attempt to organize science on a national basis through the creation of the NRC was, in many respects, the most significant wartime scientific and technological achievement. Starved for resources in the 1930s, the NRC expanded dramatically during the Second World War81 and emerged at the centre of Canadian science in the post-war era. No other organization had such influence on the development of Canadian science and technology.
The Great War changed Canadian attitudes towards science, as a force for both good and evil. It brought scientists and engineers to public attention and rewarded them with jobs, NRC grants, expanded research facilities, graduate schools, and, most important, prestige. At the end of the Great War, in an increasingly secularized world, scientists emerged as modern-day crusaders.
1 T.C. Keefer, ‘Presidential Address,’ Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (PTRSC), 2nd ser., 5 (1899), 4–18.
2 See Nelles, Introduction, in H.V. Nelles, ed., Philosophy of Railroads and Other Essays by T.C. Keefer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), ix–lxiii.
3 Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 228.
4 Although in use before 1914, the term ‘technology’ did not gain much usage until the Great Depression. Karl Marx and Arnold Toynbee, for example, did not use the term. See Leo Marx, ‘The Idea of Technology and Postmodern Pessimism,’ in M.R. Smith and Leo Marx eds, Does Technology Drive History? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 242–52. The term ‘science’ often referred to both science and technology.
5 David Carnegie, The History of Munitions Supply in Canada, 1914–1918 (London: Longmans, Green, 1925), 29, 33, 59–60, 77, 80, 216; H.H. Vaughan, ‘The Manufacture of Munitions in Canada,’ Transactions of the Engineering Institute of Canada 33 (1919), 1–5.
6 See Editorial, ‘Development of Industrial Research,’ Industrial Canada 18 (May 1917), 54.
7 R.O. Wynne-Roberts, ‘The War and its Relation to Engineering Work,’ Contract Record and Engineering Review 29 (3 November 1915), 1127–8; Ian Varcoe, ‘Scientists, Government and Organized Research in Great Britain, 1914–16: The Early History of the DSIR,’ Minerva 8 (1970), 192–5; Michael Pattison, ‘Scientists, Inventors and the Military in Britain, 1915–19: The Munitions Inventions Department,’ Social Studies of Science 13 (November 1983), 527.
8 For an account of Macallum’s career in physiology and biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, see Sandra F. McRae, ‘The “Scientific Spirit” in Medicine at the University of Toronto, 1880–1910,’ unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto 1987, 117–44.
9 A.B. Macallum, ‘The Old Knowledge and the New,’ PTRSC, ser. 111, 11 (1917) appendix A, 66.
10 John Bryden, Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret Little War, 1937–1947 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 13; Gradon Carter and Graham S. Pearson, ‘North Atlantic Chemical and Biological Research Collaboration, 1916–1995,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 19 (March 1996), 74.
11 For an interpretation of what constitutes ‘Canadian’ technology, see Bruce Sinclair, ‘Canadian Technology: British Traditions and American Influences,’ Technology and Culture 20 (January 1979), 108–23; on the importance of technology transfer and the distinction between invention and innovation in the Canadian context, see Christian de Bresson, ‘Have Canadians Failed to Innovate? The Brown Thesis Revisited,’ HSTC Bulletin 6 (January 1982), 10–23.
12 Carnegie, History of Munitions Supply, 154–5; G.J.J. Warrington and R.V.V. Nicholls, A History of Chemistry in Canada (Toronto: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1949), 172–3.
13 R.C. Fetherstonhaugh, McGill University at War, 1914–1918, 1939–1945 (Montreal: Gazette Printing, 1947), 87.
14 Carnegie, History of Munitions Supply, 154–5; for a detailed account of British Acetones, Toronto, Ltd, from an engineering point of view, see especially J.H. Parkin, Aeronautical Research in Canada, 1917–1957 (Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada, 1983), 1: 82–98.
15 Robert Craig Brown, ‘Sir John Cunningham McLennan, PH.D., F.R.S., O.B.E., K.B.E., 1867–1935,’ Physics in Canada / La Physique au Canada 56 (March/April 2000), 95; H.H. Langton, Sir John Cunningham McLennan: A Memoir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939), 46–7; Yves Gingras, Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada, trans. Peter Keating (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 71–2.
16 Carnegie, History of Munitions Supply, chap. 21; K.M. Molson, ‘Aircraft Manufacturing in Canada during the First Great War,’ Canadian Aeronautical Journal 5 (1959), 47–52 and M.R. Riddell, ‘The Development and Future of Aviation in Canada,’ Journal of the Engineering Institute of Canada 2 (March 1919), 200, 202.
17 J. Rodney Millard, ‘Phelps Johnson,’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), Vol. 15 (forthcoming).
18 Brown, ‘Sir John Cunningham McLennan,’ 95–6; Langton, Sir John Cunningham McLennan, 48–50.
19 J.S. Foster, ‘Louis Vessot King,’ Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (London: Royal Society, 1957), 3: 104.
20 David A. Keys, ‘Robert William Boyle, 1883–1955,’ PTRSC 3rd ser., 49 (1955), 63–4. Gary L. Frost, ‘Inventing Schemes and Strategies: The Making and Selling of the Fessenden Oscillator,’ Technology and Culture 42 (2001), 462–88.
21 Louis V. King, ‘The Development of Modern Acoustics,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd ser. (1919), 5.
22 Canada, Report of the Administrative Chairman of the Honorary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of Canada, Ottawa, 23 May 1918, 22.
23 Mel Thistle, The Inner Ring: The Early History of the National Research Council of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 29.
24 Wilfrid Eggleston, National Research in Canada: The NRC, 1916–1966 (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1978), 7.
25 Canada, Report of the Administrative Chairman, 22.
26 Quoted in Eggleston, National Research in Canada, 7.
27 Carl Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence: A History of the Royal Society of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 53.
28 ‘Report of the Annual Meeting,’ Transactions of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers 28 (1914), 14; ‘Canadian Engineering Standards Committee,’ ibid. (February 1920), 42.
29 See: J. Rodney Millard, The Master Spirit of the Age: Canadian Engineers and the Politics of Professionalism, 1887–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), chap. 2.
30 The Geological Survey, founded in 1842, was a government advisory body, not a learned society. For a historical profile of the Canadian Institute (as it was called until 1914), see W. Stewart Wallace, ‘A Sketch of the History of the Royal Canadian Institute, 1849–1949,’ in W. Stewart Wallace, ed., The Royal Canadian Institute Centennial Volume (Toronto: Royal Canadian Institute, 1949), 121-67.
31 See Philip C. Enros, ‘The Bureau of Scientific and Industrial Research and School of Specific Industries: The Royal Canadian Institute’s Attempt at Organizing Industrial Research in Toronto, 1914–1918,’ HSTC Bulletin 7 (January 1983), 14–26.
32 Royal Canadian Institute, Co-operation between Science and Industry in Canada: The Royal Canadian Institute as an Intermediary for its Promotion; Establishment of a Bureau of Scientific and Industrial Research (Toronto 1914); Bureau of Scientific and Industrial Research and School of Specific Industries of the Royal Canadian Institute (Toronto, n.d.).
33 Philip C. Enros, ‘The University of Toronto and Industrial Research in the Early Twentieth Century,’ in R. Jarrell and A. Roos, eds, Critical Issues in the History of Canadian Science, Technology and Medicine (Thornhill, Ont.: HSTC Publications, 1983), 155–66.
34 G. Bruce Doern, Science and Politics in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972), 2.
35 Ibid., 3; Bruce Sinclair, Norman R. Ball and James O. Petersen, Let Us Be Honest and Modest: Technology and Society in Canadian History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), 261.
36 Michel F. Girard, ‘The Commission of Conservation as a Forerunner to the National Research Council, 1909–1921,’ in Richard A. Jarrell and Yves Gingras, eds, Building Canadian Science: The Role of the National Research Council (Ottawa: Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association, 1992), 19–40.
37 Roy M. MacLeod and E. Ray Andrews, ‘Scientific Advice in the War at Sea, 1915–1917: The Board of Invention and Research,’ Contemporary History 6 (1971), 4–7; Pattison, ‘Scientists, Inventors,’ 527–51.
38 Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 102–12.
39 National Archives of Canada (NAC), Foster Papers, MG 27 II D7, vol. 18, f. 1929, T.H. Wardleworth to Sir George Foster, 17 June 1915, 30 July 1915, 3 November 1916; A.T. Drummond to Foster 24 November 1915; H. Mortimer-Lamb to Foster, 6 March 1916. See also ibid., vol. 34, f. 74, schedule ‘A,’ 1–5; Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, Duncan C. Scott to Alfred Baker, 21 February 1916, XVI; ‘National Industrial Preparedness Memorandum’ printed in Canadian Engineer, 32 (8 February 1917), 127–9; NAC, Engineering Institute of Canada Papers, MG 28 1-277, Annual Minutes, 20 March 1917, 26.
40 NAC, Foster Papers, J.W. Flavelle to Foster, 6 June 1917.
41 NAC, PC 1266, 6 June 1916.
42 ‘Report of the Privy Council,’ 6 June 1916, printed in Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute, 11 (1916), 178–9.
43 NAC, Foster Papers, Diaries, MG 27 II D7, vol. 1, 23 Nov. 1916.
44 See: J.A. Cory, ‘The Growth of Government Activities in Canada, 1914–1921,’ Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting (1940), 66–75. For a discussion of the impact of the government’s emergency powers on the economy, see David Edward Smith, ‘Emergency Government in Canada,’ Canadian Historical Review 50 (December 1969), 432–5.
45 Jarrell and Gingras, ‘Introduction,’ Building Canadian Science 1, 4; Canada, Report of the Administrative Chairman, 8–10.
46 Philip C. Enros, ‘“The Ornery Council of Scientific and Industrial Pretence”: Universities in the Early NRC’s Plans for Industrial Research,’ in Jarrell and Gingras, Building Canadian Science 45–50; Eggleston, National Research in Canada, 9–20.
47 James P. Hull and Philip C. Enros, ‘Demythologizing Canadian Science and Technology: The History of Industrial R&D,’ in Peter Karl Kresl, ed., Topics on Canadian Business (Montreal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1988), 1–21.
48 Frank D. Adams, ‘The Work of the Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research,’ Canadian Engineer 3 (15 March 1917), 234.
49 R.F. Ruttan, ‘International Co-operation in Science,’ PTRSC, 3rd ser., 14 (1920), appendix A, 40.
50 A. Stanley Mackenzie, ‘The War and Science,’ PTRSC, 3rd ser., 12 (1918), 2.
51 Ibid., 1.
52 Ibid., 4–5.
53 R.F. Ruttan, ‘A Plan for the Development of Industrial Research in Canada,’ Canada, Honorary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Bulletin No. 10 (Ottawa, 1921), 1.
54 Macallum, ‘Old Knowledge and the New,’ 65.
55 Editorial, ‘Industrial Research and its Relation to Commercial Supremacy,’ Contract Record and Engineering Review 30 (22 November 1916), 1101; italics added.
56 Wynne-Roberts, ‘The War and Its Relation to Engineering Work,’ 1127–8; Editorial, ‘The Need of Industrial Research,’ Contract Record and Engineering Review 31 (20 June 1917), 531; Frank D. Adams, ‘The Work of the Advisory Council For Scientific and Industrial Research,’ Canadian Engineer 32 (15 March 1917), 234–5.
57 Editorial, ‘Competition after the War,’ Canadian Engineer 34 (6 June 1918), 519.
58 Macallum, ‘Old Knowledge and the New,’ 69.
59 Canada, Report of the Administrative Chairman, 24.
60 A.B. Macallum, ‘The New Organization for Industrial and Scientific Research,’ Empire Club of Canada Addresses Delivered to the Members during the Sessions of 1915–16, 1916–17 (Toronto, 1917), 323; Macallum, ‘Research Council and its Work,’ 265–6.
61 J.C. Fields, ‘Science and Industry,’ Canada, The Honorary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Bulletin No. 5 (Ottawa, 1918), 11.
62 See W.T. Thompson, Graduate Education in the Sciences at Canadian Universities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 4–6.
63 Thistle, Inner Ring, 29.
64 Thompson, Graduate Education, 5–7; Peter N. Ross, ‘The Establishment of the Ph.D. at Toronto: A Case of American Influence,’ History of Education Quarterly 12 (Fall 1972), 366–7.
65 Ross, ‘Establishment of the Ph.D.,’ 365–6, 370, 372–3.
66 J.M. Neclin, ‘Archibald Byron Macallum, pioneer of biochemistry in Canada,’ Canadian Journal of Biochemistry and Cell Biology 62 (June 1984), viii.
67 A.B. Macallum, ‘The Foundation of the Board of Graduate Studies,’ University of Toronto Monthly (February 1916), 223–4.
68 The First, Second, Third and Fourth Conferences of the Canadian Universities (Saskatoon, 1917), 23–4.
69 Mackenzie, ‘War and Science,’ 5–6.
70 Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence, 64.
71 Ross, ‘Establishment of the Ph.D.,’ 366.
72 J.C. McLennan, ‘Industrial Research in Canada,’ Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute 11 (Toronto 1917–18), 154; McLennan, ‘The Problem of Industrial Research in Canada,’ Industrial Canada 17 (July 1916): 254–5; J.C. McLennan, ‘Science and Industrial Research,’ 284.
73 Ontario Archives, Royal Canadian Institute Papers, No. II, F.M. Turner to C.L. Burton, 23 August 1915.
74 J.C. Fields to editor, Canadian Engineer 40 (23 June 1921), 4.
75 Walter J. Francis, ‘The Engineer and the War,’ Canadian Engineer 30 (6 April 1916), 417.
76 On the engineers’ war service see ‘The Engineer in Peace and War – The Increasing Value of Trained Men,’ Contract Record and Engineering Review 30 (5 April 1916), 324–5; ‘The Work of the Canadian Engineers in France,’ Contract Record and Engineering Review 31 (21 March 1917), 261–2.
77 See Millard, Master Spirit of the Age, chaps 8 and 9.
78 Macallum, ‘The New Organization for Industrial and Scientific Research,’ 324.
79 Gingras, Physics, 57–8.
80 Macallum, ‘The New Organization,’ 324.
81 See, especially, Donald H. Avery, The Science of War: Canadian Scientists and Allied Military Technology during the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).