Westinghouse Electric opened a new research laboratory near the company’s main factory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1916. Located in the suburban borough of Forest Hills, the laboratory was set up to provide scientific knowledge for the older materials testing and product development laboratories at the factory. Unlike its industrial counterparts, however, the Forest Hills laboratory was dominated by a strong engineering research tradition that disrupted efforts undertaken in the 1920s and again in the 1930s to build and sustain a diversified fundamental research program. Whereas Eastman Kodak, DuPont, AT&T, and General Electric had successfully integrated fundamental research into their corporate laboratories, the Forest Hills laboratory remained the site of recurring tensions between two cultures of innovation—one based on fundamental science, the other on engineering research. Although such tensions often resulted in competing research strategies, managerial conflicts, and mismatched corporate priorities, the long-standing culture of engineering research contributed far more to Westinghouse’s strategic growth than even the most advanced fundamental research. More generally, the interactions between the cultures of engineering and science that characterize the early history of industrial research at Westinghouse highlight the evolving and sometimes conflicting patterns of technological innovation and organizational change in American industry before World War II.

Westinghouse Electric opened a new research laboratory near the company’s main factory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1916. Located in the suburban borough of Forest Hills, the laboratory was set up to provide scientific knowledge for the older materials testing and product development laboratories at the factory. Unlike its industrial counterparts, however, the Forest Hills laboratory was dominated by a strong engineering research tradition that disrupted efforts undertaken in the 1920s and again in the 1930s to build and sustain a diversified fundamental research program. Whereas Eastman Kodak, DuPont, AT&T, and General Electric had successfully integrated fundamental research into their corporate laboratories, the Forest Hills laboratory remained the site of recurring tensions between two cultures of innovation—one based on fundamental science, the other on engineering research. Although such tensions often resulted in competing research strategies, managerial conflicts, and mismatched corporate priorities, the long-standing culture of engineering research contributed far more to Westinghouse’s strategic growth than even the most advanced fundamental research. More generally, the interactions between the cultures of engineering and science that characterize the early history of industrial research at Westinghouse highlight the evolving and sometimes conflicting patterns of technological innovation and organizational change in American industry before World War II.

In the fall of 1945, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace handpicked Edward Condon, a respected theoretical physicist, to become director of the National Bureau of Standards. Already regarded by many academic and industrial scientists as a second-rate research institution, the Bureau had deteriorated further during the Great Depression. An ardent New Dealer who favored government action to prevent anticompetitive behavior in the marketplace, Wallace claimed that giant corporations leveraged their extensive patent holdings and research capabilities to manipulate markets and restrict competition at the expense of smaller firms without similar resources. Through a revitalized Bureau of Standards, Wallace intended to mitigate monopolistic behavior among large companies by transforming the Department of Commerce into an effective clearinghouse for scientific research that would stimulate technological innovation in small businesses. The Bureau's postwar expansion, however, foundered on congressional efforts to dismantle the legacies of the New Deal, Condon's lack of commitment to the technical requirements of the small business community, and the intense competition for resources within an institutionally pluralist federal research establishment dominated by the exigencies of the Cold War. Without sufficient financial support from congressional appropriations committees, Condon turned to the military to fund new research programs at the Bureau of Standards. These programs, however, owed their institutional growth to the demands of the national security state, not to the fading influence of Henry Wallace's New Deal liberalism.

The 1930s marked a significant transformation in the content and direction of industrial research at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. Westinghouse was widely respected for its engineering expertise, but it was not as well known for the type of advanced scientific research that was already underway at General Electric, AT&T, and other large companies. In a deliberate attempt to improve its image within the scientific community and match the intellectual strength of its industrial rivals, Westinghouse established a new academic-style research program in 1935. Edward Condon, a respected theoretical physicist at Princeton University, was hired to lead this effort. By 1942, Westinghouse's long-standing reputation for engineering excellence was complemented by growing recognition for its accomplishments in nuclear physics, mass spectrometry, and microwave electronics. Unlike its competitors, however, Westinghouse never conceived a coherent strategy to link Condon's research in these fields to new products and markets. Consequently, the company derived few commercial benefits from its investment in fundamental research.

In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower, the Army Chief of Staff, established the Research and Development (R&D) Division on the War Department General Staff to expedite major technological breakthroughs in weapons technology. This goal, based on the separation of the management of R&D from procurement, captured the Army's preference for qualitative rather than quantitative superiority on the battlefield, but it threatened to upend entrenched methods of incremental product improvement under way in the Army's supply organizations, collectively called the technical services. The division's brief existence (it ceased operations in 1947) contrasted sharply with the longevity of the Ordnance Department's in-house manufacturing arsenals; for more than a century they had exploited synergies between R&D and production to turn out new weapons mass-produced in industry. The history of the R&D Division and the corresponding management of technological innovation in the technical services broadens an otherwise narrow historiographical interpretation of postwar knowledge production in the United States that is still focused heavily on the moral and political economy of military-funded academic research.