Jekyll2026-03-09T16:09:41-07:00https://collopy.net/feed/research/laboratories.xmlPeter Sachs Collopy2024-12-14T00:00:00-08:002024-12-14T00:00:00-08:00https://collopy.net/presentations/2024/art-and-sciencePeter Sachs Collopy

2024-10-17T00:00:00-07:002024-10-17T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/writing/2024/crossing-overPeter Sachs Collopy

2022-01-13T00:00:00-08:002022-01-13T00:00:00-08:00https://collopy.net/presentations/2022/iterating-infrastructurePeter Sachs Collopy

2020-10-08T00:00:00-07:002020-10-08T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/presentations/2020/house-of-lightningPeter Sachs Collopy

2020-08-06T00:00:00-07:002020-08-06T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/presentations/2020/biology-returns-to%20caltechPeter Sachs Collopy

2020-07-23T00:00:00-07:002020-07-23T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/presentations/2020/from-high-voltsThe High Voltage Lab was a fabulous attraction. What is now the Sloan building then had no windows in it. It was deep down inside—just a great big basement-like room with no upper floors. And they had these big girders up at the top. The floor of this room was filled with all kinds of electrical equipment—enormous transformers, and condensers, and so on, big swooping insulators. It looked like Frankenstein’s laboratory. Great transformers topped with big mushroom rings, you know, they used to shoot sparks off of.… They’d have a “horn gap,” where a pair of wires would be close together at the top of the transformer and far apart at the top of the room. They would start an arc at the bottom and it would grow in length and rise to the ceiling. That was really impressive to watch as the arcs got up to the ceiling, and then crack, and disappear. They’d make this crackling noise as they’d go up. And then they’d charge up the condensers and shoot off big sparks, and blow up some blocks of wood, and stuff like that. According to the February 1949 issue of *Engineering and Science*, “these facilities have been used to aid Southern California Edison in the development of high voltage transmission lines, to furnish lightning protection of oil storage tanks for the oil industry, to test insulators for numerous utility companies.” The transmission lines tested at High Volts made it possible to transmit electricity to Southern California from the Hoover Dam in Nevada. Among the significant inventions of the lab was a vacuum switch designed by Sorensen and Millikan which was manufactured for aircraft and other industries. Going back to 1921, though, as Hale saw it in his letter to his fellow trustees, though, High Volts would have an entirely different benefit for the physicist he was trying to recruit. “Millikan,” he wrote, “would also have the advantage of using enormous voltage to bust up some of his atoms. This possibility, which no other laboratory could match, is what excites him.… When a man gets on the trail of the philosopher's stone, even if he isn't after gold, you can accomplish a great deal by offering it to him!” Millikan's interest did indeed come from his interest in taking apart atoms and discovering what they were made of. He was also seeking, as Hale's reference to the philosopher's stone suggests, to transmute matter from one element to another by reconstructing the nucleus. In 1904, Millikan had already written that “the dreams of the ancient alchemists are true, for the radioactive elements all appear to be slowly but spontaneously transmuting themselves into other elements.” In 1912, he believed he and his student George Winchester produced hydrogen ions from aluminum using high-voltage electricity. In 1919, Ernest Rutherford persuaded more physicists that he had caused nitrogen atoms to eject protons by bombarding them with alpha particles. Several scientists claimed they had turned various metals into gold in the 1920s using electricity—it was a renaissance of alchemy. Although Millikan submitted a grant proposal for support for this research in 1921, and although he, Hale, and Caltech as an institution occasionally referred to the High Voltage Laboratory as intended for investigations inside the atom, Millikan never published the results of his efforts to transmute matter at Caltech, nor can evidence of it be found in his surviving laboratory notebooks. In his article on the subject, historian Robert Kargon, suggests that “these efforts may have in fact been made but were unsuccessful,” adding that Millikan “preferred to bury quietly unfruitful enterprises; he position as fundraiser for an exciting new research center made such unpublicized interment a practical necessity.” Ultimately, then, the new lab would find other uses. Charles Lauritsen, who received his PhD from Caltech in 1929 and remained here for the rest of his career, made High Volts a key site for high-voltage X-ray research, building the first million-volt X-ray tube there in about 1930. Lauritsen soon became interested in the medical applications of this device, writing in his patent application that “radiations substantially the frequency of the gamma radiation from radium may be obtained from the tube” and that “such tubes can therefore be employed as the full equivalent of radium in the treatment of disease, or for therapeutic purposes.” Although Caltech biologists steered clear of medical applications at this time, its physicists did not. Millikan enlisted local physician Seeley G. Mudd, whose mother was already donating a geology building to the Institute in memory of his father, mining tycoon Seeley W. Mudd. That building is now typically called North Mudd, as the younger Mudd later donated an associated building named after himself as well, South Mudd. I for one didn't realize until I was preparing this talk that the two buildings are named after two different men. To return to our story, Millikan enlisted the younger Mudd in a partnership researching the therapeutic effects of Lauritsen's million-volt x-ray tube compared to lower voltage radiation already available in hospitals, and the Los Angeles County General Hospital began to bring cancer patients to High Volts for radiation therapy. Although he was independently wealthy and didn't receive a salary, and indeed donated money as well as his time to the project, Caltech appointed Mudd became Research Associate in Radiation, and later, in 1935, Professor of X-Ray Therapy. Physician Clyde Emery was made Assistant Professor of X-Ray Therapy at the same time. Caltech's medical physics research was so active that it became one of the main reasons for the Institute to construct a new building, Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, in 1932. Meanwhile, Lauritsen’s students, funded by their work maintaining x-ray tubes for radiation therapy, began modifying High Volts equipment for nuclear physics, making Millikan's vision of deconstructing the atom there a reality; H. Richard Crane, for example, produced neutrons by ion beam for the first time in the early 1930s. “The transmutation of the elements, now an accomplished fact,” wrote Millikan to their funder, W. K. Kellogg, “plus artificial radioactivity, plus neutron beams—all three effects producible by Lauritsen tubes—plus the manifold uses of ultra-short wireless waves, therapeutic and otherwise, open up endless opportunities.” As with many research programs, radiation therapy came to an end at Caltech when funders—not only Kellogg but also the National Academy of Sciences’ National Cancer Advisory Council and the Childs Foundation, decided to stop funding it. In the early 1940s, Kellogg was dramatically repurposed for research on rocketry as the US prepared to enter World War II. High Volts retained its unusual, single-room architecture until 1960, when Caltech renovated it into the Alfred P. Sloan Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics, producing a more conventional internal structure, with windows and five floors of space, including new basements, rather than a single large room. By this point, it had had a storied career contributing to electrical engineering, nuclear physics, radiation therapy, spectacular public demonstrations, and even science we might call alchemy.]]>Peter Sachs Collopy

2020-06-25T00:00:00-07:002020-06-25T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/presentations/2020/chemistry-comes-to-caltechPeter Sachs Collopy

2020-02-10T00:00:00-08:002020-02-10T00:00:00-08:00https://collopy.net/exhibits/2020/becoming-caltechPeter Sachs Collopy

2017-10-17T00:00:00-07:002017-10-17T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/exhibits/2017/throops-superlative-opportunityPeter Sachs Collopy

2010-05-10T00:00:00-07:002010-05-10T00:00:00-07:00https://collopy.net/writing/2010/laboratoriesHe has sufficient capital of credibility to make unnecessary its direct investment in bench work. He is a capitalist par excellence, since he can see his capital increase substantially without having directly to engage in the work himself. His work is that of a full-time investor. Instead of producing data and making points, he tries to ensure that research is pursued in potentially rewarding areas, that credible data are produced, that the laboratory receives the largest possible share of credit, money and collaboration. The characterization of lab director as investor is limited and imprecise, however. Investors have the option of being entirely absent from the operations of the corporation they hold shares in. Indeed, as Chandler points out, even the investors’ representatives on a board of directors have very limited power in practical terms. While a lab director can avoid “direct investment in bench work,” they cannot distance themselves from the lab entirely, as the authority of research produced in their lab derives partly from their reputation, which is transferred to it through their involvement in setting a research agenda. The director’s efforts to steer the lab in productive directions and bring in resources are a form of labor, focused on maximizing scientific productivity and reputational profit by directing workers. More than investors, lab directors are managers. This does not mean that a single lab director must take on all the responsibilities of management, however. In [a 1970 paper](https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01553198), Gerald Swatez describes the Alvarez group, the largest research group at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, which had 23 Ph.D. physicists, 20 graduate students, and 161 technicians. In this massive high-energy physics laboratory there was a division of managerial labor: senior physicists provided leadership, but “administrative supervision of the entire group is done by one man, not a physicist, relieving the group leader of the task.” Furthermore, the lab employed a coordinator for each experiment, an administrator for the scanning and measuring group, “and under him there are about four supervisors, whose jobs resemble that of a foreman in industry, scheduling the use of machines, shifting users from one machine to another, seeing that the rooms are kept neat.” In the Alvarez lab, Luis Alvarez delegated administrative responsibility to full-time managers. According to Swatez, Alvarez also shared his leadership responsibility, fostering an environment in which any physicist, credentialed with a Ph.D. or a graduate student, could propose an experiment. “If a group leader definitely disapproves of the proposal,” Swatez wrote, “he has the power to say so, but in this group he does not do so if someone wants the experiment badly enough to stand up to him.” Alvarez seems to have been an unusually egalitarian and humble scientist, even apprenticing himself to two graduate students when he felt alienated from basic physics at the age of 40. The distribution of management in his lab makes visible the labor that must be done in administration and agenda-setting, whether by one scientist or by the staff of the lab collectively. Swatez’s article reveals little, however, about the management of people in the Alvarez lab. In her more recent analysis of the social order of high energy physics in the late-twentieth-century, Sharon Traweek describes some other ways in which senior scientists serve as managers within their laboratories. “It is considered inappropriate,” she writes, “for someone over fifty to be making discoveries.” Instead, the most professionally advanced physicists administer research groups and larger laboratories. In Japan the leader of each research group administers finances, a “highly prestigious burden of science administration [which] occupies most of the *koza* leader’s time.” In addition, the group leader finds international placements for younger physicists in his lab, rotates them among different tasks so they develop a range of scientific skills, and brings them with him to university, government, and industry meetings to familiarize them with the politics of the research community. Traweek concludes that “the leader has a generative, nurturing role,” but it would be just as apt to say that much of his work consists of fostering professional development. In the United States, physicists manage labs more informally and leave financial management to an administrative assistant, “a managerial position almost always held by women who are not scientists and who are well versed in institutional regulations and the informal pathways through bureaucratic labyrinths.” Nonetheless, the role of a senior physicist is to “gather about him a team of gifted people whose work he directs and coordinates by means of his example, will, and—some would say—whim.” Although Traweek does not describe either Japanese or American group leaders as commanding the labor of others, it is apparent that they are engaged in management through developing the skills and organizing the labor of other scientists. These ethnographic works suggest that administration and staff development are important aspects of laboratory practice, but they don’t say much about power relations or argue that management is a defining characteristic of a particular kind of science. In [their more historical work](https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753980360040), though, Steve Sturdy and Roger Cooter argue that laboratories played a key role in “the rise of medical corporatism,” the process by which medicine in Britain came to be “organized as a vertically integrated hierarchy of relatively specialized practitioners and animated more by a managerial concern with collective efficiency than by the pursuit of patronage or individual competitive advantage.” This new system replaced two earlier economic models for medicine: competition of individual physicians for patients, and patronage of physicians by wealthy patients. The new corporate system, which developed between 1870 and 1950, involved a greater degree of cooperation between physicians in treating patients, but also a greater degree of hierarchy within the profession. According to Sturdy and Cooter, laboratories played a critical role in the introduction of this social structure to medicine. Laboratories entered public health, an “administrative discipline” concerned with the “surveillance and classification” of disease in populations, in the mid nineteenth century. Laboratory science offered public health administrators knowledge based “on systematic and rational investigation of the underlying causes and processes of health and disease” rather than “the narrow empiricism of clinical experience.” Unlike clinical knowledge, laboratory knowledge could be incorporated into an administrative system of expertise which public health officials had based primarily on the discipline of statistics. By abstracting away the specific characteristics of patients’ bodies and isolating specific chemical and biological processes, laboratories manufactured medical knowledge which was legible to administrators focused on the management of disease. More concretely, research on poisons and germs “soon yielded new techniques for identifying disease and its causes in the population and the environment.” Sturdy and Cooter conclude that “laboratory science actually developed as an instrument of scientific management,” in this case the management of disease in populations. Additionally, though, laboratory science developed as a mode of scientific management. Within the walls of a laboratory, scientists themselves practiced management, which played a crucial role in the production of scientific knowledge and went on to influence the social structure of medicine. >The laboratory sciences also provided a model of how the work of the hospitals might itself be reorganized in the interests of greater efficiency. It was common for laboratory scientists from different disciplines to collaborate in research and teaching, bringing together complementary skills and expertise to address different aspects of a particular problem. Reformers hoped that the academicization of clinical teaching and research would help to encourage similar forms of teamwork within hospital medicine. Teamwork between scientists trained in different disciplines is an important social form for production of knowledge in laboratories, but laboratory science often involves hierarchical relationships between researchers as well. Although Sturdy and Cooter do not say so, physicians could leave their experience in laboratory research with a set of management techniques as well as a taste for collaboration, contributing to the hierarchical and managerial development of medicine. The final argument I want to make is that when laboratories have become incorporated into other managerial organizations the accommodation between the two has been relatively straightforward since both have already had similar social structures. Laboratories have entered corporate environments at a number of times and places. In Germany laboratories were associated with industry before they became formally integrated into the operations of universities; [R. Steven Turner writes](https://doi.org/10.2307/27757508) that in the 1840s “Prussian respondents nearly always equated large laboratories and extensive practical training to technological chemistry and industrial education.” The industry in which they were integrated, though, predated managerial capitalism. Chandler doesn’t cover the German context, but these industrial firms were presumably less structurally complex than later managerial firms and had fewer divisions, suggesting that their laboratories may have been focused less on research than on chemical synthesis. This relationship between industry and universities in Prussia also suggests that the laboratory as an institution developed in German universities from industrial models, travelled to the United States with the research university, and then reentered industry in a new managerial context. One crucial point at which research laboratories entered industry was the establishment of AT&T’s Research Branch in 1911. This division was based within the existing Western Electric Research Department, and thus within an existing corporate structure, but was devoted to research in physics leading to new repeater technologies rather than to engineering intended to optimize existing technologies. The principal actors in establishing the Research Branch were John J. Carty, a telephone engineer entirely trained on the job, and Frank Jewett, a Ph.D. physicist. Both took on managerial roles, with Jewett hiring additional scientists while Carty developed corporate research policies and “personified Bell research and engineering” to the board of directors. Early on Jewett recruited Harold D. Arnold to serve as the physicist responsible for laboratory work on the new telephone amplifier. Within three years he had hired 25 researchers and assistants who reported to Arnold. “Jewett made occasional forays into the laboratory and sometimes even offered advice to researchers,” writes Leonard Reich, “but he acted mainly as a recruiter of personnel, a synthesizer of information, a coordinator with other branches of the Engineering Department, and a conduit to Carty and the AT&T staff.” Like the senior scientists Traweek describes, Jewitt facilitated research more than he participated in it, devoting most of his time to managing people and information. As the person at the top of the Research Branch hierarchy, he also became the representative of his division to the rest of the company. The laboratory borrowed conventions from universities, going so far as to sponsor conferences, but the existing laboratory model of the senior scientist as manager facilitated the integration of the laboratory into the hierarchically organized corporation. When the Bell Telephone Laboratories became a separate corporation in 1925, Jewett became president, responsible for managing the labor of 3600 employees. One important reason why a physicist like Jewett was able to take on the presidency of such a large organization was that he had been a manager throughout his career. The practice of laboratory research in which Jewett had been trained involved the labor of graduate students and technicians, and it was the responsibility of the credentialed scientist to guide this labor toward productive ends. Managing Bell Labs as president was different from running a lab at the University of Chicago or MIT, but it was different primarily in scale. A senior scientist, regardless of his institutional location, was responsible for such tasks as staff development, communicating with funders, and setting a research agenda, and this was no different within a firm such as AT&T. Furthermore, at AT&T research managers such as Carty and Jewett were able to represent their laboratories to the corporation in the same way that a lab director in a university or institute represents their laboratory to their colleagues and the public, and thus to take their place within an existing corporate hierarchy. ### Works Cited - Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “The United States: Seedbed of Managerial Capitalism,” in *Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise*, edited by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Herman Daems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). - Robert E. Kohler, “[Lab History: Reflections](https://doi.org/10.1086/595769),” *Isis* 99 (2008). - Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, *Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts*, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). - Leonard S. Reich, *The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). - Steve Sturdy and Roger Cooter, “[Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain, c. 1870–1950](https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753980360040),” *History of Science* 36 (1998). - Gerald M. Swatez, “[The Social Organization of a University Laboratory](https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01553198),” *Minerva* 8 (1970). - Sharon Traweek, *Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists* (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). - R. Steven Turner, “[Justus Liebig versus Prussian Chemistry: Reflection on Early Institute-Building in Germany](https://doi.org/10.2307/27757508),” *Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences* 13 (1982): 137.]]>Peter Sachs Collopy