One thing to remember is that not all research was being done in corporate labs. A lot of it was being done in universities as today? How was it funded? A lot o

One thing to remember is that not all research was being done in corporate labs. A lot of it was being done in universities as today? How was it funded? A lot of competitive funding agencies similar to today's NIH/NSF except being run privately. It's interesting that you bring up Vannevar Bush. He actually ran one of these private funding agencies (The Carnegie Institution) before being tapped to run the Office of Scientific Research and Development and modeled this (and the NSF, which he later ran) after the Carnegie -- that is, he had scientists write proposals which were evaluated by their peers and the ones judged best funded.